I am putting together a proposal for a large multinational company for our licenced solution. Problem is I've never put together something this big before and so I don't know what is acceptable. Ignoring hosting or support (or even the functionality of the app) for the moment and just concentrating the licence - do you think it's more usual to do it on a per user basis - and if so would the company mind when prices fluctuate as more users come on board? Or is it more normal to do bands of users: 1-1000, 1000-5000, 5000-10000, 10000-25000, 25000-50000, 50000-100k, 100k+ (probably maximum usage). Does anyone know of any good links about this kind of thing? Has anyone here procured a complex, multilingual web app for 30000 users and how much is acceptable?
It's going to depend on your situation I suppose, is this licensed solution already complete, or is it going to be created specifically for this company. If it's the first, I'd suggest using previous offers as basis. If it's going to be developped, it's going to depend on how you want to recoup your money for developing it. Over what period of time do you want to recoup your costs etc. I'd say that bands of users is probably the most common solution, as people probably don't want to relicense for every individual user.
With big deals it's usually discounted on each unit of whatever you're selling so that you can scale with their volume. Probably makes sense to have a base price plus a per user license that scales with their usage. Another rule of thumb is that when you have a large purchase to get approved your sales cycle will be fairly long so it's a good idea to price with that in mind. This a pretty good article by Joel Spolsky:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html
If you never took an econ course then this will help a lot.