how much do you charge?

[Bongo]

For me.... I tend to charge the following :-
$80 plus tax per hour. First 1 hour onsite in chargable, after that it's 30 minutes blocks at $40 plus tax.
If I have to travel out to some remote location, then I will charge $120 for the first hour. Especially with the price of pretrol these days.

The thing is, "average people" don't pay these kinds of fees to have their computers fixed. This is part of my problem... I want to charge what you charge, and more sometimes, but I find that home and small business users don't want to pay much money. I find myself doing work for far less. Now, when dealing with bigger companies or large corporations, your fees make more sense.

I sometimes wonder if the solution is to have 2 price structures - one for the peasants who need service but really can't afford those rates, and another pricing structure for high end businesses. Or do we just rule out dealing with peasants all together? I just find that charging anything more than 30-40 per hour is pushing it when it comes to home/office and small business customers. They don't seem to bite when the price is too high per hour.

 

[carnageX]

accquaintences, i charge whatever i feel is fair, not really an hourly rate. you can call geeksquad or whatever and get their rates for this and that...which are typically ridiculous, charge a little less than that, and then you can still sleep at night.

Computer Repair & Home Theater Consultation & Installation Pricing - Geek Squad. Use Us

Ridiculous...

 

[mark1413]

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WOW i can get an offical geeksquad member to tell me to shove the square end of the cord into the matching square socket of my printer, and the other rectangle end of the cord into a rectangle socket on my computer.

AND IT WILL ONLY COST ME 80 bucks.

lol i really feel bad for some people, geeksquad seriously rips people off... but i mean, i guess they could learn on their own if they wanted to... i mean... ****, they can get to these forums cant they?

 

[Nagasama]

im tellin ya man....they have **** loads of overhead. if all you have to invest in is a laptop and gas money, you can charge less than half what they do and still make excellent money part time. the best way to make money is to search out small businesses that have no support company and try to wrangle all their business. part time work then will usually net you some good bucks.

 

[Harper]

The thing is, "average people" don't pay these kinds of fees to have their computers fixed. This is part of my problem... I want to charge what you charge, and more sometimes, but I find that home and small business users don't want to pay much money. I find myself doing work for far less. Now, when dealing with bigger companies or large corporations, your fees make more sense.

Mate, i have been charging those rates for the last 6 years now. "average people" have with paying those rates to me.
Going rate for teches around here are $60 to $120 per hour.
Any thing under $60 per hour down here is considered a "backyard job"

 

[Peter.Cort]

at work we charge 89 an hour in house unless its a special circumstance and the boss know's the person and know's they can't necessarily pay the 89 an hour.

the thing is, in this day an age, there will always be someone needing something and they won't wanna do it themselves. thats how my mom is. before i got my job as a tech in town, she would rather take it to someone and have then reinstall windows and put data back on from an external drive, and pay them around 300 bucks, then have me do it over a weekend for some cookies or jello or something of the like.

if you're working in a business then you can charge from like 60-120 /h, around wehre i work 90 is about the mid ground, but also you have a reputation as a business so you can charge more and people will pay it. if your just doing solo work then charge like a flat fee for things, and make sure that the prices are decent.

 

[Ethereal_Dragon]

Wow... I guess that makes me a SUPER nice guy or something.....

The only thing I ask is that they give me money for hardware replacement... I really only help out family and close friends though. I do value my time, and I work 2 jobs, a full time, and a part time, averaging 55-60 hours a week.

I helped out a friend to had a P4 die on her.... So showed her a new CPU & motherboard on Newegg for under $100. She went for it, and then when it came, I fould out I ordered the wrong CPU, lol.... showed her the OEM, not the retail... So, I ate the cost of a $25 CPU cooler from the local Microcenter (They WAAAAY overcharge on stuff). Her computer wasn't playing nice when I was working on it (the motherboard wasn't liking the SCSI drives), and it took a month or more to finally get it up and running and stable. No charge. She orderd the parts from newegg, and gave them to when when they arrived. The I got a text from her Christmas day (night), saying her video card died again.... Went over there, and found out that when she moved the computer, the VGA cable was loose. Also helped her with some software isses. It was ok though, we hung out after that, no big deal. I DO give her a hard time about it though, because it was rather funny.

Next friend got a used Dell Laptop from a local computer shop for school. This was the MOST MESSED UP COMPUTER I HAD EVER SEEN. They had just about EVERYTHING on this laptop restriced. Her account was an 'admin' account, however, she was not permitted to access the control panel, couldn't changed the system clock, I don't think she was even able to change the screen resolution. It wouldn't even boot into safe mode. Also, the thing was FULL OF VIRUSES when she bought it.... constant popups and junk before it was even connected to a network. I took it home for a night, did a format & re-install, good as new, no charge.

Nother friend fell asleep at the laptop with a cigarette (smoking... yuck, nasty habit). Long story short, she melted a few of the keys with the cig. I looked and looked for replacement keys, but just couldn't locate any, so I ordered a new keyboard for her, and installed it. Good as new, didn't even ask for the money for the keyboard, because she's got 3 kids, and just was layed off from her job, so it was a christmas present.

List goes on and on. If my friends tell me they have a problem, and are cool about such as "whenever you get a chance", I am cool with it. If they are being jerks like "You better get here in 10 minutes and fix this", I wouldn't be so nice, but the latter hasn't happened. Funny enough, all my friends with the PC troubles are single women.... lol.

 

[Redmo0n]

I've got 10 dollars 2 times for fixing pc's

CClean, Virus removal and maybe some touch ups

Every other pc i did for fun

 

[Trotter]

I can't count the number of times I have put together a CD of stuff for people. I include a Word document explaining what to do with it... stuff like Spybot, AdAware, and such, as well as detailed instructions on how to do basic upkeep (defrag, MSCONFIG, an dsuch). 95% of the time all the problems vanish after that. I have had a few who lost the disk and neeed a replacement later on down the road, but that's most of it.

 

[Harper]

I've got 10 dollars 2 times for fixing pc's

CClean, Virus removal and maybe some touch ups

Every other pc i did for fun

Can I outsource you? Next time you get some one asking for computer, just let me do all the talking, and you do the fixing.

Don't worry. You will still get your $10.