Give them a quote based on your "Business Days". IE: initial response to problem will be by next <corporate name> business day - in most cases the initial response should resolve the problem.
Publish your <corporate name> business holidays and you are covered. Also ask for remote access to the systems. Charge more for maintenance if you have to go back on-site. Be sure they know that most problems are not a result of the programming but are caused by changes in local protocols or procedures. Problems of this nature are not covered by warranty. Enjoy - Jon Carnes On Mon, 2005-08-29 at 09:59, Joseph Mack NA3T wrote: > I'm bidding on a project that requires maintenance. I'll > offer maintenance on both a per incident or annual basis > (the customer will chose). The code I will install is _not_ > critical to the businesses operation, but they would be glad > if it wasn't down any more than could be helped. > > Since there's only me doing this, rather than a large > corporation, I can't guarantee a response time (eg I go > hiking for my vacations and am not contactable). What I can > offer is "best effort" (or whatever it's called) which will > usually be less than 24hrs during the week, and for about > half the weekends. If I go hiking I can get another SA to be > on call and cover for me. > > What's a good way of stating in the bid what I can do? I > don't want the customer to get alarmed that if he goes with > a single person business, that the installation could be > down for a long time. The customer has only ever talked to > me and I don't have letterhead paper etc, so he should have > figured out that I'm just a small local operation. I haven't > told him that I have a full time job and I do projects like > his to earn extra money. > > Thanks Joe > > -- > Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina > jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant map > generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml > Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux! -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
