What should i charge?

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

I've been helping a friend of my mother to get on the net.
I advised her what to buy, went with her to buy the laptop.
Have been for 4 visits & set up the wireless internet etc.
And shown her how to get on the net & get email etc.

Total time is over 10 hours + taking her old pc to the local dump

Now i've been asked to name my price££ for my time?
Any thought's would be welcome.

 

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

When I had an AST pc over 10 years ago if you need a tech to come to your house it was £85 per hour.

If it was a friend of mine I would probably do it for free unless it incurred expenses on my behalf or took time when I could be earning money. So I'd probably say give me £100

 

jobs for friends and family are always awkward to price. Perhaps she has some beer/wine in mind?

Better of spending your time on customers for cash!

 

If I'm doing support for a business, I charge $80-100/hr... perhaps as low as $60/hr for a friend's business. When I'm doing support for a friend, I charge nothing. The problem is... is this your friend, or your mother's friend? My time is valuable; if this were my mother's friend, but not mine, I'd charge an hourly rate.

10 hours, mate? Good Lord... with that amount of time, my hourly rate might well exceed the price of the laptop itself!

 

If you're leaving payment arrangements to this point then just get a crate of beer or a bottle of scotch out of it and chalk the rest up to goodwill...

If it's not your personal friend you should really have agreed this at the outset - 10 hours seems pretty insane. If you go over the top (in their mind, even though £50 an hour is pretty reasonable), they'll push back and it's a waste of your time & messy if it's a friend of your family.

My rates go along the lines of;
Close friend - nothing
Relative/'associate' - token cost as long as I have time (e.g. £20-30, "buy me a few beers/a pizza/a bottle of whiskey" - basically to discourage them wasting my time on obvious stuff they could find themselves)
Anyone else (personal support) - a high value I don't expect them to agree to, as I don't like the messyness of non-business support.
Business - well that's another discussion altogether

 

For friends I normally ask a box of sigars, but a good bottle of wine would also be OK. I depends a bit on how well I know this person.
Most of the time when I'm asked to fix problems with their computers saying "No problem, bring it overhere and I'll check it" scares them off.

 

I don’t charge my close friends anything. A policy I have. Saying that, it works both ways. My friends support one-another pretty well.

The rate goes up from that point. Someone I know very well, nominal fee for my time – mostly to discourage calling me for each and everything. Others, a fee that we decide ahead of time.

 

I use to not charge my friends...but thats only cos they want to pay me. So I charge them a flat fee of £20.

other people I will charge £20 for the first 2-3hrs...anything longer then its £10/hr. I once spent 9hrs fixing someone's PC but I charged them £70.

These days, as far as I am concerned when I am fixing someone's computer (close friend or not) it is taking up my time and effort so I do tell them how much it will cost. If I am building a machine I charge £50 on top of the price of the machine for time taken to build it and install the necessary software.

business is business after all...never mix with pleasure or you will get stung...as I have learned in the past...

 

I don't do it unless its immediate family of a very close friend and then i do it for free.

This is because after years of helping people out I realise its simply a waste of my time, many people really care care two jots about their PC, they will happilly mistreat it until it breaks or is chock full of viruses and adware.

Theres no way i can charge anything like my normal rates for PC troubleshooting, people simply aren't prepared to pay that much, as BM says its cheaper for them to buy all new hardware and software half the time.