Long-Term Neos based project cost

Using Neos & Flow
1

I am curious what in your past, practical experience, the yearly maintenance cost is, that Neos website providers should prepare their customers for.

Let’s say, for a base-line,
the customer has a basic to medium grade mainly presentational website, which is functionally a portfolio with two gallery view types, a couple of informational pages, knowledge-base like articles — maybe a blog, a contact form, a basic newsletter sign-up-only integration and a NodeType for their seasonal special promotions.

The initial website design and implementation cost,
including population with provided starter-content and
excluding CMS usage training for editors,
was about 8000 EUR.

2

These are the main cost contributors I can think of for this example customer:

  • they expect an always up-to-date website on a technical level, with all updates and upgrades carried out for them over the course of the next 3-5 years.
  • once per year on average, they want a new, existing, simple extension added
  • once in a year, they need some basic user management done
  • every two years, some unexpected technical / configuration adjustments need to be made because the law and new technology standards require it
  • once per year, they want three simple design aspects amended and two not too much involved but more prominent design changes, to reflect their brand growth
  • they do all content management, including posting of seasonal special promotions, on their own and do not need any help with that, as their editors know what they’re doing

How would you classify the round-about yearly maintenance cost such a customer should budget for? (anonymous poll)

  • up to 1000 EUR
  • 1000-2000 EUR
  • 2000-4000 EUR
  • 4000-5000 EUR
  • 5000-8000 EUR
  • 8000-10.000 EUR
0 voters
3

What if they don’t want any changes at all, and only

  • updates and upgrades over the course of 3-5 years?

How would you classify the yearly maintenance cost for this kind of Neos website?

  • up to 300 EUR
  • 300-500 EUR
  • 500-800 EUR
  • 800-1000 EUR
  • 1000-2000 EUR
  • 2000-3000 EUR
  • 3000-5000 EUR
0 voters
4

Which maintenance items do your customers require most often, that are not mentioned in the above list

and what is in your view a more realistic average yearly maintenance cost, based on what your customers want?

How do you recommend to approach offering a monthly maintenance plan to customers? … that

  • works well in practice
  • includes what they will need
  • provides for your business to a sufficient degree
  • and is an acceptable cost the customer can justify
5

We operate a cluster with serviced Neos instances. In use with our functionality that covers everything necessary and extensions of some instances. The customer pays a monthly fee. ~300 of ~400 customers do not need service, 20 do. The concept pays off. It is difficult these days to justify the costs for average websites with Wix, Jimbdo, Webflow, … With our concept we cover the signs of the times, e.g. Lawyer who warns against the use of Google Fonts and digital accessibility. All these things are done with one click.

EDIT: Of course, it was unpaid hours on the concept, technical training, etc. But in retrospect, it was worth it. With Wix and Jimdo, you can’t just call and get support or simple extensions with an api that you currently need. With us, you can. This is all made possible by this great platform, with its great people.

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6

I have customers who barely need anything in a year, some have ~1 day per month of tasks. Some take a certain amount of hours every month. I usually attach a Neos update to whatever else I’m doing as it’s mostly not much of an effort. And I clean up existing code whenever I have to work on something which helps in that regard. The migrations also take care of a lot.
So maintenance is not something I usually earn much with :smiley:
Even if I do updates for other agencies and the projects are new to me.

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