First off thank you to everyone who posts on this forum, your insights have been immensely valuable.
We are at the start of our MSP journey and still getting our agreement in place along with some policies and procedures.
I am wondering if anyone has any information about how much time is spend per month on each workstation/server for things like patch management, backup management and general maintenance (no customer calls just normal maintenance tasks).
The reason we are asking for time instead of pricing is as Tom has mentioned many times, price is governed by your market. For instance we charge $120 per hour in Whangarei, New Zealand which is pretty average for our area, some charge a little more and some charge a little less.
Knowing the average time spend will allow us to come up with a pricing system for MSP work that covers the time and the cost of services that we offer for our clients.
Workstations shouldn’t be any work if you have set up the patch policies well, everything is automated and you should get an alert of anything fails.
On our RMM it can’t do windows feature updates so there may be some work every 12-18 months when it goes EOL to either do it yourself or walk clients through it over the phone (we send out a guide for dummies)
Just to add that often workstations need rebooting to install updates and there’s the repeat offenders that never reboot so sometimes we send a popup on the screen to reboot during lunch or at the end of the day.
There is not really a per machine labor price due to most all of the updates and tasks are automated and work great. Except when they don’t. And the “When They Don’t” is a random wildcard driven by a mystery formula of Windows Updates, random hardware glitch, end users and possibly the alignment of the moon. We have some clients with 60 of the exact same workstations and randomly 1 of those will need some manual intervention.
One thing I would change is the business hours, be consistent across all plans. The buy down rates for tech support are reasonable and so are your response times. I bill hourly rates and is / man hour per location. Below is and example for a single server and is a buy down from $150. Linux and Unix Windows support is contracted to MSPs.
Annual Payment
$ 6,000
Hours Included 60
Payment in advance 1 year term
Billing Rate for Overages
On Site $110 / mhr Sunday & Holiday $125 / mhr
Remote $ 85 / mhr Sunday & Holiday $100 /mhr
