Embedded Files
General Consulting Policy
General Consulting Policy
The default remote consulting rate during business hours (Monday-Friday 8am to 5pm US Eastern/Central/Pacific) is $125/hr with a two hour minimum per engagement. Time is rounded up to the nearest hour. After hours is defined as any time outside of Monday-Friday 8am to 5pm US Eastern/Central/Pacific. The default remote consulting rate for after hours is $185/hr. Rates may be discounted for projects, retainer agreements or custom quotes. Please see our portfolio for more information on project discounts. For on-site support our business hours rate is $200/hr and after-hours rate is $260/hr. If travel is needed, travel time is calculated as part of the hourly rate. Extenuating travel expenses such as lodging, airfare, will be billed for accordingly.
The default remote consulting rate during business hours (Monday-Friday 8am to 5pm US Eastern/Central/Pacific) is $125/hr with a two hour minimum per engagement. Time is rounded up to the nearest hour. After hours is defined as any time outside of Monday-Friday 8am to 5pm US Eastern/Central/Pacific. The default remote consulting rate for after hours is $185/hr. Rates may be discounted for projects, retainer agreements or custom quotes. Please see our portfolio for more information on project discounts. For on-site support our business hours rate is $200/hr and after-hours rate is $260/hr. If travel is needed, travel time is calculated as part of the hourly rate. Extenuating travel expenses such as lodging, airfare, will be billed for accordingly.
All engagements for consulting MUST go through our ticketing system by using https://support.archous.tech/ or emailing support@archous.tech to capture the scope of work and intention to be billed for service. Projects will be quoted with a formal quote which may or may not be coupled with a formal agreement. Project quotes will be emailed to the user and MUST be accepted before work is performed. If a formal agreement is needed, it will be emailed through DocuSign and MUST be signed by all parties before work is performed.
Our default payment terms are NET14. These terms may be modified with a dedicated retainer or formal agreement. We do not allow customers to accrue a running balance of more than $1,000 unless otherwise agreed to in a formal agreement.
Consulting labor comes with a "limited operational guarantee" of the work performed. This means that for any work we perform we guarantee it to yield the intended functional results as outlined in the scope of work attached to quotes or agreements. If the intended functional results are not delivered, Archous Networks will perform additional work as needed to yield the intended functional results free of charge or will provide a full refund. The choice for performing more work or providing a full refund is at the discretion of Archous Networks. Excluded from the "limited operational guarantee" is labor that is out of scope or additional labor due to unforeseen discoveries or circumstances outside Archous Network's control. For example, issues that require additional labor that were only found at the time of implementation.
For all consulting work Archous Networks represents the following:
- All work is ensured under "Errors and Omissions" insurance.
- Archous Networks consultants are either industry certified or have held a relevant industry certification in the past 5 years.
- A "performance bond" option is available to be added to any work agreement upon request.
Fixed-Price Deliverable Based "Projects"
Fixed-Price Deliverable Based "Projects"
Archous considers engagements that meet a certain level of complexity criteria, usually involving multiple steps, coordination with multiple teams, change windows, multiple devices, or a certain expectation for autonomy as "projects". Projects are not handled on an ad-hoc engagement process or at an hourly rate but instead a scope of work is well-defined within a quote or agreement (or both) and the project is delivered based on a fixed price from an estimation of hours based on the scope. It is important to understand that with a project the customer is paying for a fixed price and not consulting hours. Archous honors the fixed price of the project regardless of actual hours used on the project. Archous also offers bulk discounted rates for projects that otherwise are not offered for Best Effort, Break-Fix, or Ad-Hoc engagements.
The benefit of this approach are discounted rates, autonomous engagement, and deterministic pricing and budgeting that both the customer and Archous can rely on. The tradeoff is the need to build well-defined scopes of work and agreements which can take time.
Best Effort, Break-Fix, Ad-Hoc Engagements
Best Effort, Break-Fix, Ad-Hoc Engagements
For engagements that are not projects, Archous offers two options:
An online booking service to schedule a break-fix or simple ad-hoc engagement session at a scheduled time. See: https://www.archous.tech/bookings
Consulting agreements to automatically bill for ad-hoc engagements when Archous is engaged by the customer. These are usually limited to best effort availability and during business hours.
In all cases, a support ticket is opened tracking the work performed and is attached to the invoice. Pricing is subjected to our default rates as defined in our General Consulting Policy.
The benefit of this approach is less time spent on scoping a project and associated agreements at the tradeoff of having a 2-hour minimum for each engagement, no guarantee for fixed costs, and no bulk discounts.
24/7 Oncall MSP
24/7 Oncall MSP
Some customers have a need to have an engineer available to them 24/7 for handling out of office or vacation coverage, break-fix escalation, networking questions, or a general second set of eyes for troubleshooting scenarios. This is considered a premium service where Archous requires all devices that are expected to be covered with 24/7 support to be on our Managed Devices plan. When a device is covered under our Managed Device plan, they have proactive and historical monitoring through our monitoring systems, backups, configuration diffs, and readily stored access credentials via pre-established remote probe connectivity for the Archous team to act as a NOC for the customer and jump in and troubleshoot at any time. Archous also offers real-time chat collaboration for Managed Devices. These tools are critical to ensure any engineer involved (including the customer) has access to all of the data needed to support the customer's network. Please see our Managed Devices page for more info.
In addition to the Managed Device plan, a customized consulting retainer agreement is built for the customer outlining how time is billed for the actual work performed once Archous is engaged.
The benefit of this approach is peace of mind for 24/7 engineer coverage availability, response time guaranteed in an SLA, real-time chat, access to monitoring, alerting, backups and configuration diffs for devices, and deterministic pricing and budgeting that scales with the size of your network.
Page updated
Report abuse