ongoing contracts

[ultradian]

I do freelance programming, but have been getting requests to provide ongoing hosting and support.  What is the best way to set up a contract for this? If it is open ended, it doesn't seem it would ever end and close with a rating.  I'd want to be charging a monthly hosting fee, but then would I be setting up a contract every month?

[JoanneP]

Hi Milton,

You can discuss this with your client. Your client can set up either an hourly or a fixed-price contract. You might want to share this blog with your client to help you decide on how to best proceed with the type of contract you will choose once you discuss the project scope. 

[ultradian]

I guess I didn't make it clear, but the question was looking for opinions about about setting up something like a subscription service. If someone wants to pay me a monthly fee for maintaining a server potentially for years, what is the best type of contract to use? What do other freelancers do? This doesn't as easily fit into the force choice paradigm of hourly vs fixed-price.

[prestonhunter]

Milton. You can use any of Upwork's contract methods that work for you.

One option is to maintain an hourly contract and enter time manually each month.

[caldus]

While I haven't had to host a website specifically, I've done other tasks for clients that only happened once a month or maybe a few times a month. For those clients, I suggested creating an hourly contract for these situations. I've had contracts that lasted nearly 2 years because of this. I guess the only bad thing about this is that it makes it look like it took me 2 years to complete a project. You could have the client create a contract and make sure the title says something like "Ongoing Hosting Support" or whatever. Something that makes it obvious what the contract is about so that it looks better on your portfolio.

[prestonhunter]

re: "I guess the only bad thing about this is that it makes it look like it took me 2 years to complete a project."

Nobody thinks that.

Nobody is looking at your profile and work history and wondering why it took you so long to "complete a project."

[richard_wein]

I haven't used it myself,  but there is an option to set up a regular weekly payment on an hourly contract. Maybe you could charge weekly instead of monthly.