Support Contract Fee

[Muttley08]

I guess it's a risk you take at the end of the day... if I go for 1500 and after the year I have done 2 days work for them then bonus for me. On the other hand, if I end up doing 20 days work then I might as well go work at the golden arch...

The good thing is I have been doing support and extra dev for them anyway (and getting paid by the hour) and now all the teething problems seem to be out of the way so in theory its smooth sailing. They just put it out there about a support contract because thier budget for me has run out. So long as it's clear as to what is covered and what isn't then I don't mind banking £1500 and taking some risk!

The other thing to be careful with is who the agreement is with...if it's a business side manager...they may move on and the next one along may not be as generous...If it's within an IT service approved support thingy then it's probably better, more sustainable, and they'll be more professional.

Seen a small company provide support for VB macros in Word docs got mucked about before..

[mashetti]

I guess it's a risk you take at the end of the day... if I go for 1500 and after the year I have done 2 days work for them then bonus for me. On the other hand, if I end up doing 20 days work then I might as well go work at the golden arch...

The good thing is I have been doing support and extra dev for them anyway (and getting paid by the hour) and now all the teething problems seem to be out of the way so in theory its smooth sailing. They just put it out there about a support contract because thier budget for me has run out. So long as it's clear as to what is covered and what isn't then I don't mind banking £1500 and taking some risk!

[TheFaQQer]

If you're only supporting a 10k cost, then it would need to be about £4k for me to want to do it.

Need to word the contract VERY carefully about what you are actually supporting, would you need to be writing new code to fix problems or just identify them, etc. etc.

I wouldn't bother if it was me, but have sold ad-hoc consultancy in the past. Buy a "book" of support tickets, giving you one hour of consultancy over the phone for standard rate plus 50% (or whatever) - minimum order is XXX hours. Cash in advance, and they might ring you occasionally to ask questions, which you charge them. Sometimes, it's an hours call, sometimes it's 15 minutes - either way, you get an hour paid for, plus you've had their money in the bank for a while.

[Muttley08]

I didn't mean negligence...meant environment changes that cause problems e.g. policy / hardware / OS changes etc.

I've had a couple of really painful negotiations over this sort of thing. £1500 isn't a lot to play with to actually provide much - is it worth the hassle?

[VectraMan]

A bit hard to prove client negligence.

What about availability? If you're working full time elsewhere you might have a problem.

I'm hoping to push my current client in this direction at the end of my contract, so this is interesting. Anyone know how an agent would react to this sort of thing? Would they still want their cut as normal even though it's not going to be worth a great deal to them?

[mashetti]

Sweet. How about the VAT inclusive or exclusive total. On 10k exclusive @15% it would be £1500. On 10k inclusive (£11.75k) would be another £250. maybe I just make it easy and go for £1500.

[Muttley08]

A rule of thumb is 15%.

But make sure you get the contract watertight - that if it isn't your software, they pay T&M.

[mashetti]

What would be a reasonable fee to charge a Client for 1 year of support. One way would be to do it on a % of the overall development costs (including VAT? or excluding VAT?) so what would be a fair price for 1 years support - 10%, 15%, 20%, 25%, 99%! Dev was only around 10k so it's not huge £ but it all adds up This is only to keep current system up and running and nothing to do with any new changes etc so in theory is money in the bank.

I guess I have to be careful as some numpty at the Client could break something which I then have to look into and fix when it's their stupid fault... maybe I could have something saying that any faults found to be caused by Client negligence will be charged at normal rate of £xx per hour.