What should a person charge for Tech Help?

Factual Questions
1

I’ve been helping close friends and family for a while now with software questions and hardware upgrades.

It’s easy for me, I can learn about different computer systems and software, and it puts to use some years of screwing around on the internet and my own computer.

For them, it’s friendly service, they don’t feel like I’m trying to sell something or screw them over, and they can ask me just about any question without feeling stupid. In fact, a couple of friends have said I’d make a pretty damn good teacher.

Considering that I intend to pursue this line of work full-time in the near future, it’s always nice to hear and appreciate the compliments.

This is all fine and fun with no problems up to this point.

The problem? Now these people are telling other people who are telling other people that I could help them out with their problems too. At first these connections were close enough that a beer or two was enough of a payment to keep me happy.

But now they’re far enough removed that charging them seems reasonable. I just don’t have a clue on how much.

Any ideas?

2

Yep, I know the problem. I’m a Helpdesk technician for a telco in a small city. As soon as all my friends started coming on-line, I started to have a little trouble with spending almost as much time at home doing tech support as I did at work. And they weren’t even offering me beer! This fixed it.

More seriously, make it sorta like this . . .
I’ll charge ya $10-$20 an hour, minimum charge is 1 hour, and I will do what you’ve asked.(IE, explain, teach, install, upgrade)

Beware, beware of those who begin to speak the dreaded phrase “Oh yeah, while you’re doing that . . .” Never start a project with incomplete specs! Make absolutely sure you both understand what you’re gonna do!

And let them know about time restrictions, if any. An aquaintance of mine once was rather shocked at my reaction " . . .bbuuut all I wanted to know was . . . ."

“At four o-freakin-clock in the morning!! Some of us have lives and JOBS we have to be at!” You can imagine the rest of the rant.

And I do have a sliding scale depending on who asks, and how ugly the job is likely to be.

Hope that helps,
Tisiphone

3

I charge from $700 to $1100 a day for PC help.

4

Yeah, that helps. Thanks tisiphone.

I’m not good at charging people. It always feels like I’m screwing them somehow, I don’t know how, it just seems so easy. But seeing how relieved they are that I helped, I thought I should charge something.

I’ll give it a shot and see how they react (Not my family or close friends, mind you, I mean the strangers I could care less about).

Judas Anthracite, is that the norm? What are you doing?

5

Please realize that you are doing both parties a favor by charging for your services. My mother is a professional speaker that charges up to $7000 per speech. Early in her career she realized that she got treated like garbage when she did pro bono speeches. However, people always treated like gold when they paid a lot of money for her services.

I have also found this to be true in my IT career. My friends and family absolutely cannot afford the rates that I charge to work on their home PC so I refuse to do them.

To directly answer your question: $20 - $40 an hour sounds reasonable for your services. These are in line with the market but will not break the average consumer.

Think about it this way. You want to start a lawn mowing service in two years. Your “friends” and family call you at all hours to cut their lawn so that you can gain a little experience. What would you do? It is exactly the same thing!

6

I believe that Anthracite is offering highly specialized support, for software she wrote herself, and her customers are all in big industry, so a grand a day is probably reasonable. I would strongly suspect that that’s not the going rate for helping someone install Netscape.

Then again, if you can get away with it…

7

I’m a corporado now, but I spent most of the last 11 years as a consultant. My firm was not engaged in computer consulting, but we occasionally did deal with clients’ hardware/software problems. If we used none of our own equipment (i.e., we delivered a warm body to deal with the problem with the client’s hardware and software), we charged $65/hour. That’s circa 1999. At the least you should charge that much (and we low-balled that, because it was not our primary business and we only did that for geophysical consulting clients).

I would never presuppose to rent myself out as an IT guru. But, occasion arose where client X had purchased a new HD and paid me the minimum half-day to have it installed. I could do that in an hour or less and they readily paid me something close to the cost of the drive because they knew I was going to be around to deal with whatever came up.

They were happy with the transaction and so was I; what else could you ask for?

8

It helps to remember my clients are Billion $$ utilities. Typically, one in the industry charges salary times a 2.5 to 3.0 multiplier. This multiplier covers overhead, benefits, expenses, marketing, etc. And of coure, profit.

So at $40 an hour direct salary, with a 3.0 multiplier, for 8 hours a day, one gets $960 per day. So yes, in the spheres I work in, those are typical rates.

What do I do? Anything that the client needs, to be able to run the software I write to do plant analysis. From installing Windows NT, to setting up my own software, to scanning for viruses on a plant computer.

9

Cnote,

Both Anthracite and I have posted from the commercial perspective. On rereading your OP it is apparent that your addressing the retail crowd (i.e., personal computing at home - damn! We paid $3000 for this computer just 3 years ago and you’re trying to tell me it’s old news?).

I would guess that a less restrictive atmosphere might allow you to drop the rates a bit, but, if you’re really a wham-dingy at gettin’ it done, $50/hour is reasonable, even for the home folks.

10

Well, I spent 4 hours today trying to get a laser printer, inkjet printer, scanner, and a cutter (for cutting vinyl for T shirts)to all work at the same time and all I got was $20. Oh well, I didn’t really accomplish anything, and I have no job.

11

Real world pricing

Config and fixit-install work 50.00 per hour minimum for home fixits even if less than an hour. 65.00 hour if for businesses.
Full setups - All components out of boxes hooked up and attached to net 125.00 - 150.00 + per setup depensign on complexity.

I would caution you about getting in too deep with this. I do this as a “hobby” and still get too much business from the “friend knows a friend” reasons you mentioned to the point that, if I let it, it could easily interfere with my ability to make money at what I really do for a living which is selling commercial real estate).

Unless you’re getting paid seriously and professionally like anthracite or beatle as a sideline to a regular paycheck, being a basic PC tech can be a relatively tough way to make a living compared to other things you can do. If you love it fine but be forewarned.

12

Be sure to have a written contract. How much you charge should be based on what they can pay. Also, charging by the hour is okay, but charging by the job is better. That way if you fall asleep on the job they won’t have to pay a lot.

13

I have to disagree with handy on this. Charging by the job has a risk.

Another Anthracite Real-Life Example so you all can be bored as story time with Aunt Una unfolds…

This happened to us last year.

Example - a client wants you to install Windows NT on a network to act as a server. You specify that for the princely sum of $5,000, including all expenses, you will come and install NT on a single computer, and get it working as a server. Simple, right? $5,000 should be able to cover anything?

Ah, but when you get to the site, you discover that the machine has a special SCSII controller that for some reason does not let you install NT - the boot floppy will not recognize it. So you start to browse the web, and make calls, and after 1 day you have nothing done.

At even $65 per hour, no multiplier, you are now at $520. No problem.

The next day, you get tech support online. They tell you they charge $100 per hour to handle questions. You are on for 3 hours, and nothing gets accomplished. You spend the rest of the day trying to make the SCSII card work, but no dice. So you tell the client you want to buy and try a different SCSII card. They insist that it’s not their fault, they have an identical machine in their office two towns over that works - what’s your problem? Aren’t you qualified?

So you buy a new top-of-the-line SCSII card for $300. It will come tomorrow.

Third day - SCSII card arrives after lunch, you plug it in. NT recognizes it, and starts instlling, but crashes with a Blue Screen of Death when trying to boot for the first time. You have no idea why. Third day is gone.

Fourth day, after spending all night in tech forums, you have a plan. You swap memory you bring from home. Re-install. Nothing. You start removing hardware, one by one, until it will install. Upon removing the network card, it works! Yeah! The network card is a strange brand, that for some reason only works on Win95 and Win98, NOT NT. No one knows why. Doesn’t matter, you buy a 3-Com Etherlink for $15 and re-install NT.

Fifth day - three problems. First, the video card looks “funny”. It works in 1280x1024, but leaves streaks on the screen sometimes. You don’t think it’s a big deal, but the client absolutely has kittens when he sees it. So, you spend another half hour finding and installing a new video driver. It works. Cool!

Next problem - the machine cannot get an IP address from the DHCP server. Why? Because although there is a twisted pair cable in the office, it is not connected to the hub! So you wait the rest of the day for the “official” phone/network guy to waddle up and plug one cable into one hub. You could have done it in 5 seconds, but the client has “security measures” on their network closet.

The first week is now over. You have spent 40 hours at $65 an hour, or $2600. You bought a new SCSII card for $300, and spent $300 on phone support that did no good. You are also out a $15 network card. At $3215 spent, you still might make it under budget. But you have much more software to install…

Note that I changed numbers and scaled them. IRL, the job was supposed to be $10,000 including plane fare, and it ended up costing about $12,000 (3 trips to CA from Kansas).

Of course too, if you wrote the contract such that any additional hardware and phone support required was paid for by the client, you would have done a bit better in this situation. A good thing to remember, especially if YOU do not spec the equipment yourself.

14

Thanks guys and gals. I appreciate the info.

I think to keep things fair and easy I’ll stick to charging by the hour and keep the rate somewhere between $25-35, depending upon the job. That seems reasonable. It was also along the lines that I had been thinking about before, but needed some confirmation. Cool.

Until I get more comfortable with my abilities and more famililar with what others are charging, I’ll be hesitant about the whole issue. That’s the end I don’t like- dealing with, “That’ll be $175. Cash. Now.” “What!?! You were only here for half a day? What a rip off.”. That’s the kind of confrontation that I try to avoid, and usually do so by undercharging or not charging at all.

But your advice Mav, makes sense. I can see that while it seems odd, you’re more likely to be taken seriously if you charge alot than if you eat the cost. Good advice.

While I’m on the subject, another question comes to mind- How do I, or you, approach a mistake? Do you switch to working for free until the problem that you caused is remedied? Or do you keep charging away?

I’d think the fair approach would be not to charge for mistakes and only charge for time that you’re helping. But again, I try to be fair to a fault.

That’s it. No more questions from me.

As always, thanks for the insight and helpfull replies.

15

Well, the point of my looooong post was - it depends on what you are legally obligated to do. And don’t think because you are a small-time organization, or an individual, that you do not have a legal obligation to do and finish the work when they pay you to do something.

Personally - if I make a mistake that is entirely my fault, I fix it for free. No muss, no fuss. If I break something by my own fault, I charge my own company to replace it - that’s part of our contingency. If I am only partially at fault, I either 1) fall back on the contract, or 2) appraoch the client and say “look - I know we said we could do this, but you did not say it was going to be a quint-boot NT/Linux/OS2/Nextstep/Solaris X86 box. I think some additional compensation is required.” Or if it is completely out-of-scope work, and it takes more than 1 hour (total), I charge them it according to an out-of-scope fixed rate schedule.

If you give too much away, you might think that the average client will appreciate it, and shower you with goodwill and additional work. That is a lie, IMO. They instead start to use you, and take advantage of your goodwill towards them, and then have the gall to act hurt when next time you only do what the contract requires.

As long as you are on time, on budget, and meet their requirements, the client will return to you until a compelling reason exists not to.

16

"Example - a client wants you to install Windows NT on a network to act as a server. You specify
that for the princely sum of $5,000, including all expenses, you will come and install NT on a
single computer, and get it working as a server. Simple, right? $5,000 should be able to cover
anything? "

Ah, but I make an addition to the contract that specifies that there can be addional costs if we encounter tricky situations, like the one you mentioned; but all additional costs must be approved by them first. :slight_smile:

17
      • Right.
  • So anyway, do all PC’s have sound cards? I have an Acer Aspire that’s about 3 years old. While attempting to deal with a software conflict with the “sound card”, I found that it doesn’t have one that I can see. It only has two cards, video and modem. The sound feed from the DVD feeds onto the motherboard, and the jacks on the back of the case come off the motherboard. - MC
18

It sounds like the sound card is integral to the motherboard - something very common in lower-midrange quality motherboards. You should go into your BIOS setup utility and check to see if there is an option to disable the sound support.