(Video Below)

 

Tom Hermstad with H&D Technologies here, here to talk about a taboo subject, pricing in the managed services industry.

 

When you're going to get a contract to maintain your computer systems, how do we price?

 

First thing is you got to have total transparency. So that's our motto. We're transparent about all the support we do for our clients. So why not be transparent about how we charge, right upfront?

 

We have a price calculator on our website at and you can go to it, put in the number of users you have and a few other things, and you can actually get a quote that is not exact, but is pretty close to what you're going to be getting once we figure it out 100%.

 

After doing some analysis on your network. There are two main types of contract.

 

One is a fixed cost and the other is an hourly.

 

And fixed cost is usually by head.

 

That's how we figure it out. How many users you have. It's $195 per user per month.

 

That's pretty much in Southern California a good rule of thumb. Most of the MSPs I know in this area are charging around that amount. It can go as high as $225 depending upon the complexity of what your network has.

 

The other one is hourly.

 

That is just you work an hour, you work a half an hour, you get charged for that. Usually that's going to be in the $175 an hour to $225 an hour range. It's almost always more expensive to do hourly than it is to do fixed cost.