We offer various levels of service contracts, depending on your needs. When determining the size of a service contract, we consider two factors: the basic maintenance issues, and the projects necessary to implement.
Minimal Maintenance Retainers
We are happy to maintain your network and all of your computers. We have clients who drop machines off at our location for virus and spyware removal, picking them up in a day or two. Besides cleaning, we keep track of the main software installed on your systems, and usually keep them up to date with current security patches.
If you want this type of support, we set a minimum retainer amount based on the number and types of your computers. That works out to be about an hour per month per Windows computer, or 1/2 hour per month for most Linux or Mac computers.
Whatever this hourly figure works out to be will be treated as a retainer in that those hours can only be spent in the month they're reserved for. If they're not used, they expire.
Project Service Contract
The other component of our service contract works more like a bank account or line of credit. We determine the number of hours to dedicate to your projects over the course of 6 months. That time goes into a bucket, and we can use that as fast or as slow as fits our schedule--you can use it all up front, and then pay for it over the 6 months.
Hours in the project part of a service contract do not expire, as long as we have an agreement in place.
A pure project service contract, for you, works out to be a payment plan with no interest for the six month term, at a discounted hourly rate. We like it because we can budget our work and income over a longer period of time.
Minimum contract
The way we structure our service contracts, we are essentially extending you credit for up to six months. Our minimum service contract is $300/month for 6 months, which gets you a bucket of 20 hours.
Some of our smaller clients use this to develop a web site, or an event registration system, or a variety of other custom applications. Sometimes this is purely used for training and support. How you spend those project hours is up to you.
Hybrid service contracts
Most of our clients are interested in a combination of the minimal maintenance retainers and the project service contract. For example, one of our clients has a mixed environment with three Linux servers, one Windows server, one Mac server, two Windows desktops and four Mac workstations. Managing just the servers works out to be a 5 hour minimum monthly retainer. At that level, Freelock Computing acts in a purely reactive way, responding to calls when there is trouble.
By increasing the amount to a 10 or 15 hour service contract, we take a more pro-active approach, partnering with the company to work out a single-sign-on system using LDAP and implementing a project management system for the entire company. At the 10 hour per month level, the customer has a total budget of 60 hours to use over 6 months. 30 of those hours will be reserved for the maintenance retainer, but the other 30 hours can be used right up front to deploy the solution.
Ongoing Review
We re-evaluate contract amounts quarterly. If you aren't using all of your hours, and don't forsee using them, we can adjust the amount down. Likewise, if you're out of hours and would like to do more, we can either extend the contract or increase the amount.
Our goal is to make you so pleased with the results of our service that you'll want to renew our service contract and continue to grow computing systems to help your business!
Contact us if you're ready to get started!