What does project support mean?

Question

Freelance

Hello!
I often see in the list of freelancer services such a service as "Project support" for n money per month.
Could you tell me, please, what does this concept include, what does it generally mean?
I myself have been a freelancer for several years now, I have developed from scratch several medium and large, by my standards, projects, there are regular clients, the list of which is growing. I work like this - I set a fixed price at the start of the project (very rarely at this stage, hourly payment) after agreeing on the TOR, I do the work, I hand over the work, I get paid. If further errors occur that are related to my work (the software does not work as described in the TOR), I correct it for free. If there are errors that were not reflected in the TOR - for additional. fee. If some improvements are needed later, then I evaluate it as a new job, or we switch to hourly pay.
Let's say I tell the client after the delivery of the project - "support costs n money per month", what will it include? After all, the problems that arose due to my shortcomings, in fact, I have to fix for free, and improvements outside the TOR will be paid separately.

Answer 1

So look at the description of this service from others, for example, it may include N tickets - calls within a month (questions, requests for revision), suggesting a response time within T hours and requiring no more than M hours of work of a tracker specialist. This hour within the M is cheaper than an hour of the usual hourly. But if the clock is not selected, they burn out. If additional hours are needed, they are paid at the base hourly rate. This is beneficial for the client, because he knows that within the framework of the tariff you will have time for his problems - it is reserved, and he receives it with a small discount. It is also beneficial for you, because you will have the whole month sold in advance to different clients.
At the beginning of the month, the client makes an advance payment. At the end of the month, you provide the client with a report and an act.

After all, the problems that arose due to my shortcomings, in fact, I have to fix for free

- I don’t know how “in essence”, but according to the law - according to the GPC - otherwise: the client has only 5 working days after receiving the acceptance certificate to identify all bugs and malfunctions and demand their free elimination. You eliminate - he has a new 5 days. The client signed the act and found a bug after - you have every right to take money for its elimination or do nothing at all. Other terms of the contract make it contrary to the GPC and enslaving.

Answer 2

Well, for example, there is a client who pays me 123 thousand rubles a month, which I support.
Server and its uptime
Dev environment for developers
Backups
Software updates, security fixes, all sorts of bad muscles and so on, minor constantly, major every one or two years
Editing the site if something fell off by itself or during an update.
Optimization of code and queries to the database.
Scheduled load testing and preparation of scaling for the season.
The client is not particularly annoyed by this amount, it is much more important for him that everyone works, he is annoyed even by five minutes of downtime, that is, if there was a downtime for at least a minute, they will pull me to a full investigation of the causes and their elimination so that this does not happen again. That is, a couple of minutes the site was already tearing up without vaseline.
Another example is a client paying two hundred bucks a month for support of
Backup
Edits if something
breaks. Auto-updates of software.
90 percent of the time I do nothing, but the client is calm that when the X hour happens, I will be ready to take a hit and fix everything.

Answer 3

Support or maintenance of the project is technical support, which includes the revision and correction of errors + a few more things, but the specific list of services must be specified in the contract. Read more .

Answer 4

use Bitrix or 1C as an example for this semi-guaranteed rental time for developers and it will quickly become clear - order 40k, support 5k, if you look for a new one for revision - at least 10k
and in general the software needs to be updated once a year so accurately, but in practice more often, to maintain servers .. in short, a lot of things for a monthly fee, as a result, it’s cheaper than with an emergency

Answer 5

Support includes the concept of "support", or rather, the literal text of the contract.
Supports are different: you can simply fix problems as soon as they appear, you can "keep an eye" periodically on the state of the project.
If "update the software, monitor the database, scan the security" - then this is not support, but maintenance.
If everything is ok with the project, then you do not touch it, but as soon as something breaks, you immediately week, month, discuss everything in the contract.This is a significant point in pricing) break down and fix what is broken. You can agree that work up to X time is free, then (so that the client does not leave) at half the usual rate or even at the usual rate. There is a limitless field for marketing. Any discounts, offers, everything to your taste.
The bottom line is to receive, conditionally, for the support of X projects money "in the background" (this, of course, ideally)
The second plus is the client, if he wants to do / correct / add something, he will come to you with 99% probability.

Answer 6

Imagine that the project is important and if a problem occurs, they will call you at one in the morning and ask you to fix it. Here, supporting this is all that you will do so that
1. everything works and they don’t call you with such requests
2. if you did call, you were able to fix everything quickly, and not in a couple of days.
And the cost of such support is the money for which you are ready to be in touch 24 hours a day and carry a laptop with you to the sea on the weekend so that if something happens, you can fix it right away.

Answer 7

The minimum support is usually limited to keeping the software up to date. Everything else is negotiated separately.