Does anyone else charge monthly maintencance fees?

Teri Hanes · #1 (**permalink**) 09-19-2003, 12:55 AM

Just curious if anyone else out there has used the same marketing concept that I have used for my web site clients of charging a monthly maintenance fee.

I charge a set price for the design of the original web site and then each client has the option of a monthly maintenance fee, which varies, based upon the complexity of their web site or paying a flat hosting fee with any additional modifications being charged at my hourly rate of $80.00.

An example of this is charging a monthly maintenance fee of $59.95 a month for a 7 page web site which includes, hosting, search engine submission, any modifications or changes to the site, banner ads as requested, meta tag optimization, bandwidth, e-mail boxes, free counter, free link exchanges.

In doing this I have managed to create a very nice residual monthly income and was wondering if anyone else was utilizing this same concept.

___________________________
Teri Hanes, Web Developer, Programmer
If you come to stay----build!!!

http://www.hanes-originals.com

#2 (**permalink**) 09-19-2003, 01:05 AM

Hi Teri,

This is a break room, here we are supposed to talk about off-topics. Julian - our Milk moderator - is probably sleeping, that's what save you...

Anyway, your questions are relevant, but you should post in the right class.

JP

carju1 · #3 (**permalink**) 09-19-2003, 06:24 AM

I don't know, I do a bit of work then check in to the break room to see if anyones posted anything amusing and whay do I find? Teri's talking work......

OK Milk monitor hat on... check rules... Right talking work in the break room, first offense ummmm... OK Punishment for Teri no more free cookies in the break room for her for a week :)

Actually looking at the forums list I have no idea which forum this queston should be posted in, apart from a slight connection to the eCommerce forum I guess the only place you could have posted it was in here.

Takes milk monitor hat off.

Yes I have a couple of sites that have maintenance contracts allowing them text changes new images and general updates for a fixed annual sum. Way back when I was writting small bespoke business applications (mainly in paradox for DOS) I automatically offered maintenance/update contracts. When I started doing web sites I automatically offered the same type of thing to the web site owners. Now-a-days they tend to prefer to update etc. themselves but maintenance contracts are easy money if you can get them.

Regards
Julian

Reesa Marchetti · #4 (**permalink**) 09-19-2003, 01:00 PM

Hi Teri,

Good for you if you're getting $80 an hour. My hourly is $35. Maybe I'm not charging enough. But I don't have many clients yet, and the inquiries I've been getting lately don't want to even pay my relatively low fees.

Anyway, I do have one client with whom I have a monthly contract. $500 to maintain two e-commerce sites. Not much to do most of the time except when they add products, which is infrequently.

Other clients, I maintain for them hourly.

altyfc · #5 (**permalink**) 11-28-2003, 07:31 PM

We charge maintenance on either an annual basis (a set fee for a fixed number of hours) or an ad hoc basis.

Aaron