Systems development
Website support agreement, what should it include and cost?
By Optifirm's consultants2 min read
When the website is launched the real work begins. Updates must be made, faults fixed and new ideas built. A support agreement decides who does it, how fast and at what price. Here is what a good agreement contains.
Do we need a support agreement?
If the website matters for your sales, yes. Without an agreement nobody is responsible for security updates and backups, and every small change becomes a new order with an unknown wait. An agreement costs less than a single longer outage.
What should be included
- Security updates and software updates.
- Backups, preferably daily, and a test that restoring works.
- Monitoring that detects when the website is down.
- A guaranteed response time, expressed in hours or working days.
- A number of hours for changes and further development.
- A report of what has been done.
Response time and resolution time are different things
Response time is how quickly the supplier confirms the request and starts looking at it. Resolution time is how quickly the fault should be fixed. An agreement that only states a response time does not actually promise that anything gets repaired. So check in particular what applies to critical faults, for example when the whole website or the sign in is down.
What does a support agreement cost?
For an ordinary business website a support agreement often costs between SEK 1,000 and 5,000 a month. Agreements with more development hours and shorter response times cost more. Compare the hourly rate the agreement gives with the supplier's ordinary hourly rate. A good agreement gives a lower hourly rate the more hours you commit to.
Five questions to ask
- What happens to hours we do not use? Do they expire immediately or are they carried over?
- Do small requests count against the hours or are they included?
- Are faults in what the supplier built fixed at no cost?
- How long are the commitment and the notice period?
- Which hours does support cover and how do we reach it?
Warning signs
- The response time is described with words like promptly instead of a number.
- The agreement says nothing about backups.
- A long commitment with no option to change level.
- No reporting, so you do not know what you received.
Choose a level based on real need
Look at the past six months. How many changes did you ask for and how long did they take? Rather start at a lower level and move up when the need shows, than pay for hours that are not used.
