How much to charge to build computers

you got any friends lol,no serious thou dont you think thats a high price to build a comp for m8,if they spend £1000 on all the hardware your telling me you charge them £150:eek:
 
Mates i'd do it for nothing but friends of friends + support for the whole year, 10-15% sounds alright to me. Tho u may want to point them to the OCUK prebuilts to save them hassling u everytime windows crashes...
 
creed said:
Mates i'd do it for nothing but friends of friends + support for the whole year, 10-15% sounds alright to me. Tho u may want to point them to the OCUK prebuilts to save them hassling u everytime windows crashes...
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Call outs i don't mind,i guess some one has to support my upgrades:cool:
 
I work on 5% for office spec builds, 10% for gaming builds (extra hassle with "waaah WoW isnt running") and my after sales supports is free food (preferably pizza) while fixing :)

The upshot is the more desperate they are for you to fix it the better the food is.
 
My local rate is £35ph.

Close friends and family there is no charge but friends of friends pay full charge.

I would only build PCs for clients I'm well established with because it's not the time of the build you have to think of. It's the support afterwards because they will call you. You need to include a contingency time/charge in you quote and make it clear to them that support isn't included and any faults must be reported within 30 days. This draws a line in the sand so to speak.
 
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I do it for free, the support part as well ;).

I definitely wouldnt like to be your friend if you charged me 100quid for something like that.
 
It has been a few years since I did a build I charged for but about 5 years ago it was something like £20 and a crate of beer as an average sort of price. I didn't ask for a set amount, just said to pay what they thought was suitable, I wasn't offering any real after sales service although I did fix a couple of problems afterwards.
 
i normally scale it to the spec of the build

building a computer is not difficult and most people i like to show them the inside of the case before i set the machine up in their home

they normally say what a neat job i have done and i leave it at that

i built a £300 base unit for someone and charged £25 for build and windows install
but the £800 games machine i built before christmas i charged £35

to be honest i enjoy doing it so i dont like to charge for the build
and most people are respectful of when they choose to call me out

i normally just ask for a tenner for petrol and time if its a quick fix
most appreciate being shown how to fix the problem if it occurs again and pay a bit extra
 
The support is the killer...they would have to understand that if they had knackered the system through their stupidity/carelessness, then you would have to charge...
 
£200 for businesses, then I give free email support (answer questions etc)

for friends, usually £0-40 or beer

otherwise you're just wasting your free time
 
Depends who it is. Cheapo build if I actually ever charged upto £50. If I sensed they are the clueless type, i'd advise a prebuilt machine with pro-support, because there it no chance I am spending my weekends "fixing" a machine because they left floppy disk/usb key/cd in the drive and it won't boot.

I don't expect peeps to call me for help however. Just like I don't expect the time my wife tells me her OAP client needs her PC fixing and have to sit there and smile and explain 300 times over why she can't get into hotmail because she's using co.uk instead of .com (and yes, within about a second i'd spotted the likely cause lol). Or call outs to fix blinds....

I do it because I'm nice :) (sometimes)

Matthew
 
I usually go for payment in kind.
EG.....box I just built for a cow-orker, didn't charge a penny, but got him to add my new monitor to his order, saving me from filling out finance forms (monitor was more than my CC limit). He gets his box, I get my monitor with less stress.
I also got to bench his 4850 against my 8800GTX (an annoying experience I'm afraid, as it either closely matched, or beat my card).
Windows was a total pain to get on his machine though, wish I had charged money. Buildin hardware is easy, dealing with MS (esp when it's got drive inumeration issues) is just not worth it :D
 
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