1

Thanks for reading.

I understand that many MSP’s support clients with 80+ computers and users.

My main client base are eye doctors with 10 computers, law firms with 15 computers, etc.

Can anyone provide me with what type of pricing they are using for clients of this size and needs?

I am struggling with advice since all of these models seem to be based around large organizations.

Thank you for your time.

2 Spice ups
2

Are you only supporting hardware, or do you provide high-level management advice as well?

Some clients we simply charge per hour (with an agreed scope of work for preventative maintenance schedules and management reporting etc), others we work out a fixed monthly cost which we track and adjust as necessary.

We avoid ‘per computer’ pricing as it doesn’t reflect the reality of differing business needs. Some 10 user businesses take 10 hours of work per month, some take 2.

3

Thank you for the reply Joe,

I currently charge an hourly rate for all work for all clients.

Some of my current clients I would like to move to MSP and future clients.

I would provide cloud backups, antivirus, encrypted email, monitoring. In addition to the cloud SaaS, I will add free support for backup support, virus removal, encrypted email, and monitoring. All other support is back under the hourly rate.

My guess is about $40 per workstation and $85 per server.

The highest level management for my clients is HIPAA compliance, AD, encrypted backups, VPN, Exchange - that is about it.

4

I have a few question marks over your move to “MSP”

Let’s take cloud backups as an example.

  • How often are you going to test restore customer data?
  • Will clients know the cost of down-time when restoring from a cloud-backup?
  • How are you backing up the backup? Where is the second copy of the data?

These are the type of questions I’d raise with all your SaaS offerings, you need to be genuinely delivering more than just reselling software from another vendor.

The answer to these questions might be

  • Every 3 months we do a full test restore and every week we restore one file
  • Clients know how long it takes to download the data but they pay for us to have a copy of the data on a USB ready to be shipped to site.
  • Data is uploaded to our rented server space in our data centre, a mirror copy of all data is then duplicated to our offices over a HTTPS/VPN for redundancy if the data centre has an issue.

This is what an MSP should be offering customers, you are not a “Managed Services Provider” if someone else is doing the managing for you :slight_smile:

1 Spice up
5

Thank you for your reply Breffni,

Cloud:

• Testing and restoring data would happen twice a month for the workstations. The cloud backup provider I use performs their own testing for servers.

• Any client with a server will also have a local backup running on their system provided by Acronis or Symantec. Because this is not part of the agreement and support for their local backups will fall under a discounted IT support rate.

• One of my biggest selling points on the cloud backup is mostly for workstations. Mainly because of the Cryptlocker virus. As much as I push each client to save their data on the server, they still unknowingly save it locally. This also goes for Outlook PST files. The cloud backup will help protect from this damaging virus.

Thoughts?

1 Spice up
6

What is your geographic location? What do other similar businesses charge? Knowing those things makes a big difference.

An MSP in Manhattan for instance charges much more than someone in rural Indiana.

We have clients that pay via prepaid blocks of hours, Managed Service Contracts and just per hour. We try and keep it flexible for the clients. We have clients as small as a single person shop up to thousands. You need to stay flexible so you don’t lock yourself into one size fits all which alienates many clients, depending on your location.

7

Hi Danielle,

I am in Chicagoland. I understand the prices for regions as well.

If you are not in my area, I would love the chance to talk a bit privately about some pricing structures for MSP?

I definitely have the billable hour and block time rates down, just want to know more about MSP.

Mainly for client sizes of 5 - 30 devices.

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I would be happy to talk to you. You can PM me anytime.

9

Disaster strikes, you need to do the restore and….it fails.

I would strongly encourage you to work out testing disaster restore for servers as well as desktop clients for your own peace of mind.

Depending on the client, it might be worth just forcing the issue of saving onto the file-server, why waste the money on backup agents and time managing individual desktop data.

Use Group Policy to dictate folder re-direction for desktop/my docs/appdata

To the end users, they are still saving in My Documents but actually they are storing it on your server.

http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/367742-folder-redirection-gotchas

Make sure you test folder-redirection and learn all the ins and outs of it properly before deploying to a live site though.

10

Breffni,

I have clients with multiple locations and no servers. Simply just cloud applications and they are definitely saving locally on their desktop.

Aside from folder redirection, some camera software for eye doctors and other custom software for clients, with servers may not be able to reside on the server. So the data stays locally on the PC.

Client with server may travel for a few weeks. When they are out of the office the folder redirection or folder sync may not be available.

So many scenario, ha.

11

Hi there Errol! Looks like you already have some great advice from fellow SpiceHeads above. I just wanted to jump in to provide you with a link from MSP Mentor which you might find useful to model off of: http://mspmentor.net/blog/managed-services-pricing-keys-formulating-optimal-pricing-your-business

Some key points I found interesting from the link:

  • Is your offering broadly available?
  • Remember to keep your target customer (eye doctor, law offices, etc. in mind)
  • Make sure you have a competitive advantage

Since you’re trying to get an idea of the optimal prices to charge for your services, I thought this might be of value to you. Hope this helps you out! :slight_smile: