How to price support

[BobRoosth]

One of my computer support clients asked me if I could take on the on-going support of their web site... adding pages for newsletters and new products, updating existing pages.

I do this for a couple of clients on an hourly billable basis. I am wondering what others do in this situation, and at what price?

[Kelvyn]

I offer to rewrite their site to include a content management system so they can add their own content. It may cost them the same as 2-3 years support but they are then in charge of adding their own content.

For older, non-tech clients I do offer support in a total package which includes hosting etc. There is no set cost for time spent on support, as it is usually based on an hourly charge between £15 and £35.

[Richard Waller]

I charge £35/hour generally, but would prefer to charge £100/month, because this is a prod to me to review the site, ring them up, visit them, make suggestions, do all the changes necessary. But now one of my clients has changed to his own content management, and frankly this is now a mess. And a couple of others have decided to do the work themselves, actually quite well. Looking at the bills, £1200/year is a tidy sum of money.

[dthomsen8]

Originally Posted by Richard Waller

I charge £35/hour generally, but would prefer to charge £100/month, because this is a prod to me to review the site, ring them up, visit them, make suggestions, do all the changes necessary. But now one of my clients has changed to his own content management, and frankly this is now a mess. And a couple of others have decided to do the work themselves, actually quite well. Looking at the bills, £1200/year is a tidy sum of money.

Charging a fixed amount by the month is great, since it avoids any quibbling about the details and keeps the result current.

For the client doing his own content management, is the result a mess? Your last remark indicates that the result can be quite good, once the work of setting up the content management is done, but I would be concerned about the client messing up the design somehow.

[Richard Waller]

Originally Posted by dthomsen8

For the client doing his own content management, is the result a mess?

The problem with the Content Managment client is that he wanted to do all the work himself but then failed to put enough effort into converting the important parts of the existing material.

And One page had a rather complex series of tables, and this was not easy to convert.

What I ought to do is to spend several hours, for which I might be paid I guess, but I am bored by this whole thing.