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The_Geek

Hi all

I am thinking of starting up a small business to fix people's machines at home. Intially it would be a sideline.

The problem I am having is to decide how to charge. Do I charge a simple flat fee or should I go for per hour? If I end up having to do a total reinstall, that could take hours! Given its for home users, what do people think would be a fair amount for say:

a) removing virus/spyware
b) hardware upgrade (time only)
c) total reinstallation of OS

Has anyone tried this and what was their experience like? Should I bother or is it not worth it?

thewizard

I was thinking of doing this but I dont have time I was going to charge £35 call out charge then £8 per hour for what ever it was

aurora_borealis_2

thewizard wrote:

I was thinking of doing this but I dont have time I was going to charge £35 call out charge then £8 per hour for what ever it was

I'd pay that.
So much easier than carting it all to a shop. I'd charge less for older people if they had a simple problem.

thewizard

And its simple plus you can put extra couple of quid on the price of any parts if you need the money.

amcluesent

With digital cameras etc. being some common, lots of people must want larger (75 - 100Gb+) hard disks in laptops. If you set-up a service to upgrade laptop disks, that might have some takers?

You'd need to invest in some adaptors to mount new 1.8 and 2.5 disks as USB drives, a USB CD drive to boot from and Acronis TrueImage or Norton Ghost. Then you could expand peoples existing C: drive partitions(s) to the USB drive then swap the hard disk out of the laptop. Easy if you know how, charge the cost of the h/w plus £50.

I'd let people come to you, saves time and you can have several jobs on the go at the same time.

nickmack

There was another similar thread a while ago about this. I can't for the life of me find it at the moment!

Anyway the upshot is, that you should be able to charge reasonable money per hour for stuff like upgrades.

However for some reason, people don't expect to pay top dollar for a service like IT support in their home.

They will happily pay £60-£150/hour to have their car repaired, have a plumber fix a pipe, get an electrician to wire in another plug but seemingly not so much for PCs.

I'm at a loss to explain why, so someone might have an idea!

The only other main problem discussed was people constantly badgering you after you've been out to do the job. The reality is alot of people like to fiddle and if things mess up again, they will nearly always say that you haven't fixed the problem properly, even if it's unrelated to the original problem.

It can be alot of hassle and one reason why I only do B2B work and repair friends computers for free. Then there's no issues!

thewizard

If you repair other peoples computers I would get your "victims" to sign a contract saying that the work is done and that any work that is required after this would have to be paid for as the job is complete. Then they cant force you to do repair work for free

zappahey

thewizard wrote:

I was thinking of doing this but I dont have time I was going to charge £35 call out charge then £8 per hour for what ever it was

I wouldn't get out of bed for those rates. By the time you pay your expenses (travel, vehicle, business insurance, etc.) and so on, you'll be making less than minimum wage.

For a start, consider that if you're not actually working, you're not being paid. When you're travelling to a job you're not getting paid. When you're on holiday you're not getting paid. So you need to make enough to cover all of those gaps. If it's any help, our local PC shop charges £35 per hour for home calls and that seems reasonable to me.

You won't find a tradesman in the country to come to your house for that price, why should PC repairs be so cheap?

thewizard

Well I was only going to do it in my spare time for my friends to start with on the side to get some expirence in pc repairs as I am only 13, people would be a little aprahensive to get a kid to fix their computer. But thanks I knew it was cheap but I didn't know I was that cheap.

albertross_2

whatever happened to paper rounds?

thewizard

Dont pay enough and I dont want to get up at 5 in the morning to deliver papers in the freezing cold. Plus it would make me late for school.