Handling and charging for support with clients

Question

I manage 80 sites of varying sizes. Small brochure to large scale eCommerce.

I have a way of charging for support and assessing a monthly fee for this time and it's currently "adequate" but I don't know if there's an industry standard for this. How do other people assess the support needs and cost for a client.

The other part of this question is about standard support and priority support. Is it unethical or sleazy to have two support options. One with X number of hours for a response time and charge 50% more for half of X number of hours for a response time.

Answer 1

To answer your second part, I don't think its unethical to charge more for a better product, with support being your product in this case.

Think of it the same way many employees would think of overtime hours. If you're expected to wake up at 4am to fix a critical issue with a site you maintain, you better be getting paid something extra for it.

Answer 2

You're giving the customer options about what level of turnaround they want, and allowing them to choose what gives them the best bang for the buck. This isn't unethical or sleazy. In fact, many customers will thank you for giving them the opportunity to get a better handle on costs and response times.

There is no industry standard for support billing that I know of.