Hiya,

My friend and I are having a disagreement on the best way to handle website maintenance post site completion. We can't decide between ... do you charge just a monthly fee for making changes to site or ... do you charge X amount for X number of changes per month? Anyone got any input that would help here on this? Any assistance is most appreicated

The way I do it is I have a yearly maintenance contract available for my clients.
For $X per year I will do minor updates on a no charge basis. If the client does not want a contract then I charge an hourly fee for ANY updates they want.
Most of my clients buy into the yearly contract.

Mike

Hiya Mike,

Can you be more specific please? At the risk of you devulging your plan info which isn't my intent, I'd love a little more structure to explain to my friend so we have something to go on to structure a good plan. What would be a good fee, what do you consider minor changes, that type of thing and what are good hourly rates for something like this.

We've never charged for building sites for anyone (have mostly done charities or just gaming sites for our guilds and such) so it's all pretty new, but we want to give it a shot.

I basically charge 10% of the project price as a yearly fee.

So if I charged $3,000 for building the site, I would charge $300 per year for maintenance, but I have a minimum fee of $100 per year for lower priced sites.

(I have done a few charity sites also, but I still charge for them, I don't do anything for free except my own site)

Minor changes = change/add/delete email addresses, update to a text file (I use either SSI or PHP includes for content sent to me by my clients making it very easy to change), etc.

If they want to add new pages then I charge an hourly fee depending on what the pages need. My hourly fees range from $60 to $140 depending on the complexity of the pages (static vs database, etc.)

Mike...

Wow Mike thanks so very much, that's more helpful than you can imagine. I'm sure we'll be discussing it for a while, but your input has helps a lot and is most appreciated. Have a great holiday and see you when I get home after Thanksgiving