[TriLUG] On bidding maintenance.

Jason Tower jason at cerient.net
Mon Aug 29 12:15:58 EDT 2005


you need partner with someone else to back you up when you're not 
available.  tell your customer that you'll provide 24x7 support, period. 
  being "a small local operation" doesn't have to mean "we can't support 
you like $bigcorp".

jason

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
> 



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