Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by EdwardMSmith 1013 days ago
This is what I do for a customer that I've had a long relationship with.

For $X00 per month, they get business hours on-call access and up to 10 hours of actual support work. I think the retainer/hours thing is a lot more palatable.

I offered 24x7, but having done it many times over the years, my price for it was about 3x the business hours support price, and the company was b2b, so it was mostly business hours anyways, so it wasn't a big deal.

The cost (to me) of always having to carry a laptop around, always be in cell range, always be mostly sober, always have my phone ringer turned on, etc. requires significant compensation, and for me, $1000 per month is nowhere near enough to deal with that.

You've been doing it for a few months, so you have an idea of how disruptive it is, and having done it for free, the thought of $1000 for doing the same thing may sound nice now, but be sure to extrapolate it out another 6 months or so of being tethered 24x7 to work, and price it based on how you're going to feel then, not now.

1 comments

> You've been doing it for a few months, so you have an idea of how disruptive it is, and having done it for free, the thought of $1000 for doing the same thing may sound nice now, but be sure to extrapolate it out another 6 months or so of being tethered 24x7 to work, and price it based on how you're going to feel then, not now.

Good point. Perhaps I can charge $1500 instead.