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Until recently we had no maintenance agreements in place.

Clients not paying a thing for years yet you still being the point of contact if anything, and anything at all, goes wrong! Looking back it was lunacy.

The problem now is that these clients are going to be asked to pay one or there is no support, very tricky situation.

Clients are going to be lost but there’s no option left other than to put these in place.

Trying to sell as much value as possible in the agreement but any other advice?

We don’t currently have maintenance contracts in place, but we know it’s something we need to implement soon, as we take on larger clients. Make it a retainer as a set monthly fee for a number of hours. Even if they don’t use up the hours, they still pay the rate. No carry-over.

If you have some decent sized clients and you truly do a great job and show your value, expecting a monthly retainer of a few hundred+ isn’t out of the question. It sure beats hiring someone in-house to handle that stuff.

I’m not the expert though. So anyone else have thoughts?

I do charge a monthly fee for maintenance. My main reason is that I’ve had situations where I had to fix issues on sites that where neither the fault of the site or the client, but mostly due to hosting annoyances.The webhoster wil never pay my hours and neither will my client, it’s not his/her fault. It resulted in me fixing stuff for free just to avoid losing the client.

The rate is not high, certainly not hundreds, more like 20-30 dollar a month, depending on the complexity of the site. On some sites I loose, on others I win, I see this more as a way to ensure good service and avoiding discussions about who’s the cause of problems. For this fee they can call me anytime for questions, tips, troubleshooting, as long as it’s website related.

I do have clients who chose not to pay any maintenance fees and got into trouble with their site. Usually I offer those clients half a year warranty as part of the contract. After that there is still the risk of difficult discussions, but at least they have been given the choice and can more easily accept fees for work that needs to be done every once in a while.

We don’t think that support/ongoing maintenance is something that should be optional, nor should it be an add-on after a site is built. We think it’s part of our service. We also present ourselves as service providers, vs. product providers to our clients.

http://netraising.com/nonprofits/advantage/

Over 95% of our clients sign an initial 24-month agreement with us to design/build/support both the website, and the publishers that will use it. 85% percent of our clients stay with us beyond the initial 24 month period and we’ve been doing things this way for nearly 10 years. We currently support nearly 200 live EE properties.

The monthly consulting retainer fees provide our clients with a service fee for their website that’s easy to predict and budget for, and it provides our business with a reliable base of revenue that allows us to grow without tapping credit or investors.

Some clients will move to a hosting + hourly support model after the initial 24 month agreement with us. Then, when their webmaster moves on, or the website is ready for a new design, or an upgrade to EE 2.x.x, we move them back into another 24 month agreement. We retain the client this way and we’ve seen the entire staff of some organization’s turn over and been able to remain their web consultant.

Our business/service model makes zero sense to a lot of folks, we accept that. If all you’ve ever known is hourly work, then it’s difficult to believe that you could sell your current clients on something like a monthly retainer, but what if you went after a client base that does understand and appreciate the benefits of doing business/service differently?

Each year our business starts out the year with pre-contracted monthly support agreements. Since we retain more clients than we loose each year, the amount of those pre-contracted monthly support agreements grows. We started this year with over 70% of our work (and revenue) for the year already booked.

I plan to write a white-paper on this subject, and the history of my business this next year. One of the stats I’ve been tracking on it, is the percentage of each year’s gross revenue that was pre-contacted. (See attached graphic).

Think of it this way. You have to earn $100 to pay all of your bills next year. You could start out the year with nothing in your pocket, or you could start out the year with $70. We hope to get to the point where we start out the year with $85 in our pocket, and while it takes a few years to get to this point, we’re on our way.