Pricing Maintainence Services

Ken McLean

Member
Joined
Nov 6, 2006
Messages
5
Programming Experience
5-10
I am a beginning developer building a custom solution for my first client using Visual Basic.Net 2005 and SQL server 2005. I am looking for a ball-park estimate of what I should charge a year to maintain the product as a percentage of the original development cost. Maintenance would invlove correcting bugs, minor enhancements, updating and re-configuring web page content.

Any suggestions would be most helpful. Thanks.

Ken McLean
 
This is more of a general developer question than anything to do with VS or VB. I've moved it to the Contracts forum as that's about as close as this forum gets to this subject matter.
 
im just curious... why would you charge a flat rate / year? wouldnt that be a possibility of making you lose money... why wouldnt you just charge an hourly rate? i would think that would be a fairer way of doing things, that way they get what they pay for and you dont work overtime unnecessarily...

i am only a begginner maybe you guys would know more, but that is my opinion

what do you think

have a good one

regards
adam
 
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Charging a flat rate will only make you lose money if your software or documentation is cr*p. If you release well-written software with good documentation then there should be very little reason for your users to need to contact you. If you charge an hourly rate then you get nothing, or next to nothing.

If you charge an annual maintenance fee then you are locking your users into your product, ensuring that they upgrade regularly as you release new versions. This means that you never have to support anything but the latest version and it also nesures that your users will continue to use and pay for your product. They will not simply stick with an old version to save money and they are less likely to switch to a competitor.

As I said, the amount of work you do also depends on your documentation. You can't justifiably charge a customer an hourly rate for a bug fix, so you'd get nothing for those anyway. As for "how do I" type questions, you should write good documentation and tell your users that if they want hand-holding on any topic that is covered in that documentation then they will be required to pay extra. That will encourage people to use the documentation that you spent time creating instead of taking the lazy way out and asking you to repeat the same instructions over and over to every user. It's a shame more developers don't think to use the available documentation themselves. MSDN? What's that? ;)
 
haha, yeah thats quite true i have come to realise that msdn is more helpful than people give it credit for... despite the fact that it might be complicated sometimes, some things i have learnt completely, just by using msdn rather than using a forum (a forum though, is much more convenient despite having to rely on other peoples goodwill, experience and time).

in that case... then the original post has me stumped... exactly how much WOULD you charge / year, something thats fair to you but at the same time doesnt rip the other people off.

beats me... but hey im a beginner. maybe someone else will reply and will have a better response than i did

have a good one

regards
adam
 
It would depend how much support you envision your users needing and how often and how big your upgrades will be. I'd go with something about 15% - 25%. Make sure that the upgrades are worth it but don't go too overboard and leave yourself nothing to add the next year.
 
Don't forget too that you might want to establish what is an "upgrade" and what is a significant program change. Some users think that some relativly -major- code changes are just "upgrades" and will expect that you do it in the alotted agreement.

Now, how you determine that boundry is the trick, just be aware that you dont want to agree to perform unspecified upgrades for a fixed price per year, and then you end up coding 50 hours of changes for 200$.
 
Actually, I think I may not been answering exactly the question that was aksed. I was considering an application that was to be distributed to more than a single customer and maintenance resposibilities extended to that app only. If this is a custom solution for an individual client and the maintenance extends to Web content and alike then the figure would almost certainly be higher than the figure I quoted. Exactly how much higher I couldn't really say.
 
Thanks. Yes, I am building a custom solution for a single customer -- a non-profit volunteer organization with limited computer skills. They don't have a precise notion of what they want and I expect the initial program will need some tweaking and enhancing as they gain experience with it. I think your figure of 15 to 25 percent is about right.

I could charge by the hour but I don't like to bother keeping track of time. If the requests become too burdensome I can always renegotiate the arrangement after the first year.

Ken McLean
 
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