Why I Charge Flat-Rate for Managed Services and Never Hourly (And Why You Should Too)
MSP flat-rate pricing — why never hourly
Alignment of incentives. Here's what that actually involved.
The Setup
How to calculate flat rate
What I Built
Alignment of incentives
Alignment of incentives. This is where most implementations go wrong — not in the concept, but in the specifics that documentation tends to gloss over. The version that's actually running in production looks different from what the README describes.
How to calculate
How to calculate flat rate. This is where most implementations go wrong — not in the concept, but in the specifics that documentation tends to gloss over. The version that's actually running in production looks different from what the README describes.
The client conversation
The client conversation. This is where most implementations go wrong — not in the concept, but in the specifics that documentation tends to gloss over. The version that's actually running in production looks different from what the README describes.
What Broke First
Objection handling. This is the part that took the most time to figure out — not the implementation itself, but the failure mode you only encounter at the wrong moment. The fix is in the tooling, not the concept.
What's Running in Production
The stack: msp, pricing, business, managed-services. Monitoring via Zabbix with a custom alert template. The rule I apply to everything in production: if it can't self-report a failure, it doesn't go in.
Key Takeaways
- Alignment — alignment of incentives
- How — how to calculate flat rate
- The — the client conversation
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Live Life Automated covers the broader philosophy behind how I think about automation and building systems that don't require constant babysitting. Available at mfitz.net.
