Need help with sell price calculation

[Wolf123]

Hi this is my first post so please bear with me. I and a couple of co-workers (all engineers) designed a industrial automation machine. These machines typically sell for $20,000-$30,000 each. We recently learned that a local company is looking to purchase a design (engineering drawings and the rights to them) for this type of machine. The idea being they can manufacture it on their own and thus save on manufacturing and assembly costs. They typically need 20 of these per year to bundle with their product. We're considering selling our design to this company but have no idea how to come up with a fair sale price? Is there a rule of thumb or method for calculating the sales price?

[Freelancier]

There are no "rule of thumb" ways to calculate what you should price what you're selling other than: whatever the market will pay.

You can figure out how much time you put into it and multiply that by the pay rate for that time.

You can figure how much it would cost someone else to design the same thing and try to be enough lower than that to make it worthwhile to purchase it from you instead of creating it themselves.

You can charge them one number up-front... or you can accept a per-unit payment to allow them to spread out the costs (which then also allows you to price it a bit higher, because you're helping the customer spread out the costs), but there's risk involved as well, so price that into each unit.

You can partner with them and have them manufacture them for you as well as for themselves, so that gives you something else to negotiate over.

[VeritasCustom]

Sometimes you just have to determine what it's worth to you. It seems like a difficult thing to price out.