Ad-Hoc Support Contract

For gen­er­al day-to-day sup­port, the most basic solu­tion is for us to agree to an ad-hoc sup­port rela­tion­ship. An ad-hoc rela­tion­ship is well-suit­ed to orga­ni­za­tions with robust inter­nal capa­bil­i­ties, or those with high­ly vari­able needs (a lot of work one month fol­lowed by noth­ing for anoth­er three). If your needs are con­tin­u­ous, or you don’t have the lux­u­ry to wait in queue if we’re involved in anoth­er client project, then we’d rec­om­mend a retain­er. 

An ad-hoc con­tract is a pay-as-you-go approach where you con­tact us if you need help and we’ll work on an hourly basis that is billed at the end of the month. We set an upper lim­it on hours that’s con­sis­tent with your needs. 

Broad­ly, this agree­ment will outline:

• What work we’ll be able to help you with
  
• The max­i­mum num­ber of hours we are available
• The cost-per-hour
• How you can get in touch with us
• When we’ll respond
• How long the agree­ment will last
• How you’ll be billed

This more casu­al approach will ben­e­fit you if you fore­see your­self only need­ing the occa­sion­al help­ing hand every cou­ple of months.

The upside 👍🏻 It’s flex­i­ble. If you don’t need us for three months then it won’t cost you a penny. 

The down­side 👎🏻 We can’t guar­an­tee you imme­di­ate avail­abil­i­ty. When you do need us and it’s going to be a lit­tle bit more expen­sive per-hour. We also won’t be han­dling any proac­tive sup­port like admin­is­ter­ing updates etc.

Con­tract

Regard­less of the approach you want to take, once we’re fin­ished a project, we’ll send you an agree­ment to sign that out­lines the relationship.

Here’s a break­down of some of the key areas that it will include.

Scope of Work

Basi­cal­ly, this is what is and isn’t cov­ered by the agree­ment. We’ll out­line what sort of work falls under sup­port. If it’s not with­in this scope we might sug­gest putting togeth­er a sep­a­rate stand-along state­ment of work. 

Here’s a broad idea of what’s usu­al­ly cov­ered in these agreements: 

Tech­ni­cal support:

• Bug­fix­es
• Serv­er updates or upgrades
• Tech­ni­cal consultation

Design Sup­port:

• Pre­sen­ta­tion design
• Social media post design
• Dia­grams, icons, and illustrations
• Design con­sul­ta­tion

We’ll craft the agree­ment to respond to where your needs are. 

Our Band­width

This is the upper-lim­it of hours we will have avail­able to you dur­ing a month. 

In the rare case that you need addi­tion­al hours beyond this then they will be charged at a dif­fer­ent ​“out of scope” rate. 

Com­mu­ni­ca­tion

Here we’ll out­line how you can raise issues with us. We have three approaches:

• Sup­port system
• Email
• Slack

Note that we don’t offer phone or Skype/​video chat as a con­tact method.

Using our sup­port sys­tem is the best-bet as it means it’s eas­i­er for us to man­age the request and get start­ed on it. If you con­tact us via email or Slack we’ll have to take the time to enter the request our­selves, so we rec­om­mend using our sup­port system.

Response Time

In gen­er­al we will always aim to get back to you as soon as pos­si­ble, but this out­lines the time with­in which we’ll guar­an­tee a response time by.

Bear in mind that this isn’t the time we’ll be able to actu­al­ly fix an issue, it’s just the time it will take for us to get back to you to dis­cuss it.

Usu­al­ly this will be 2 work­ing days.

Time Esti­mate

Once we’ve received a request we’ll get back to you with an esti­mate of the time we think it’s going to take as well as when we will start work­ing on it. We’ll wait to hear from you to con­firm and then get work­ing on it with­in a par­tic­u­lar time. If there are any issues along the way we’ll get back in touch with your to keep you in the loop.

Usu­al­ly we’ll begin with­in 5 days of receiv­ing the request

Pric­ing

This is the cost-per-hour for sup­port. We break it down into ​“reg­u­lar hours” that fall with­in the band­width we’ve agreed is avail­able and ​“out of scope hours” which are those extra hours out­side of that commitment: 

Emer­gency Support

In the rare case you do need imme­di­ate help that falls out­side our usu­al response time, this will be charge at the ​“out of scope” rate.

Pay­ment

Because this is an ad-hoc agree­ment, we’ll invoice you at the end of every month for the hours you’ve used.

Dura­tion

These agree­ments will usu­al­ly have a dura­tion on them after which we can both reassess.

Usu­al­ly this is 3 – 6 months

If you’ve got any ques­tions about this, get in touch at hello@​weareferal.​com