He said, "Let there be one pricing structure," and there was only one.

[Valhalla_tech]

I could never get away with your operating system, malware removal, home networking, or data transfer pricing in my area. I wish I could though!

Just curious, what's your area and what do you charge?

 

[fencepost]

I'd call the cost of credit card payments a cost of doing business and making it convenient for your customers to pay you. Do you charge them for your time and mileage to deposit at the bank (or for any fees for non-presence deposits) if they pay you with checks?

Make it easy and simple for your customers to pay you as soon as possible in whatever way lets them initiate the payment as quickly as possible.

 

[Valhalla_tech]

Do you charge them for your time and mileage to deposit at the bank (or for any fees for non-presence deposits) if they pay you with checks?

Honestly, if I could, I would. One of my goals is to come out of pocket as little as possible. Maximize billable time. But, I realize there are some things I'll have to eat the cost on to enhance customer experience. I guess 2.75% is a small price to pay for the added payment options.

 

[fencepost]

if I could, I would. One of my goals is to come out of pocket as little as possible.

Obviously you're billing them for this, because the cost of it is built into your prices. What you don't want to do is itemize out every little expense that you incur as part of doing business - that's the kind of crap pulled by large corporations that advertise "$99/month* (*before we add in $40 in itemized taxes, fees we can't explain, fees we won't explain because it'd piss you off, fees we won't explain because they're unjustified, etc.)"

I say this as I listen to Comcast Security telling me my call is important and apologizing for the "extended hold times" on speakerphone. I've been waiting for just over 2.5 hours on this call; earlier it was around 50 minutes on my cell before the call dropped when I walked into another room.

 

[sapphirescales]

Okay...but, what if there is 2.5TB of data in the backup?

We have a similar pricing structure. We charge $79 for up to 100GB and charge $1/GB after that. However, we have a cap of $120 for data transfer for any individual computer. So even 10TB of data backup would be $120.

 

[fencepost]

I say this as I listen to Comcast Security telling me my call is important and apologizing for the "extended hold times" on speakerphone. I've been waiting for just over 2.5 hours on this call

My reaction when I finally got through to someone for 5 minutes and got off the phone involved the term "goatf*ckers!"

I actually got the same person who called my customer this morning (!), and while she sounded nice she neglected at that time to indicate when the original problem was. It was the DNS reflection issue that they called about on 12/21, which was fixed on... 12/21, minutes after they said "DNS DDoS." The fix was as simple as a firewall rule to drop UDP packets destined for port 53 arriving on the port that's connected to the cable modem.

Duration of that call was 2:43:47.

 

[Markverhyden]

I never charge based on data store size for data transfer/backup. The measurement of my efforts are made in units of time. So basically it's my hourly rate. Since work like this does not require me to be sitting looking at the spinning whatever it usually runs between 1-2 hours. Obviously this does not apply to a true data recovery. But I still cut them some slack since I'm doing things at my pace so to speak.

 

[PR Tech]

We use this pricing structure for Trip Charges. We are located in California, where gas prices are very high and our roads are a shamble. Our shop has 3-6 on-site jobs per day. So these Trip Charges add up pretty fast. We have yet to have a customer complaint. I reimburse my staff .60/mile (they use their own vehicles) + they are getting paid their normal hourly wages while driving.

[URL='http://prtech.repairshopr.com/products/1330765/edit']Trip Charge 0-4 Miles: No Charge
Trip Charge 5-8 Miles: $10.00
Trip Charge 9-12 Miles[/URL]: $15.00
Trip Charge 13-16 Miles: $25.00
Trip Charge 17-20 Miles: $35.00
Trip Charge 21-24 Miles: $55.00
Trip Charge 25-29 Miles: $75.00

 

[electrokhan]

Seriously? I think you need to revise this number, as you are charging many times more to simply copy files between healthy drives than what most data recovery labs charge for that amount of data from a drive with crashed heads.

A 2TB drive that is perfectly healthy and just full being copied to a larger 3TB drive:
Your price is, based on the above math, $2039USD (I'm assuming the USD part)

A 2TB drive with a blown PCB, Stuck Heads, Firmware Issues, Bad Sectors and File System issues, completely full:
My price is $350CAD for professional data recovery services

Is my math off? Am I missing something?

lcoughey, Hi, this is Khan you are right Data recovery charge by Valhalla don't work unless Customer has no place to go. I provide onsite services in mississauga, ON and when it come to transfer Data I inform the customer that it will depend on Transfer rate of their hard drive and storage they provide (external Drive). I charge first hour $60.00/hr. Residential and 70.00/hr. commercial the 2nd. hr. 50 and 60 and for more than 2 hrs. i give a reasonable combo price to earn my time spent and same time not loosing customer and it works fine almost every time.

 

[nathan1979]

We don't pass Credit card fees onto customers... we just built the 2% into our prices...

If you think about it if your service call was $100, that's only $2.50 in service fees... most customers would get turned off if they saw a $2.50 CC Service charge on their invoice.

Like a in previous post, you don't add in fees for your cellphone usage, hydro to fix their computer (for shop service) etc... All these little things get built into your overall labour rates.