Monthly Contract Estimator
This estimator compares the cost of carrying two employees directly against a fixed monthly contract. The contract includes active work plus readiness pay: the value of staying available, prepared, and ready to respond when the company needs help. It also shows the point where readiness pay stops representing useful coverage and starts becoming overpayment risk.
Employee Assumptions
These assumptions answer the first question: if the client hired these two people directly, what would the real cost be after assumed time off and employer overhead are included?
- All calculations are based on a 52-week year at 40 hours per week.
- Contract coverage is not limited to weekdays, and contractors remain available seven days a week for scheduled work, urgent issues, and off-hours support as needed. (To avoid interrupting typical workflow, we perform maintenance work between the hours of 10 PM and 2 AM.)
- With vacation/PTO and personal days, many employees receive around 4-6 total weeks of paid time off per year. This estimator just assumes those as unpaid time.
- Wage reference: Open the Department of Labor OFLC wage screenshot.
Employee Detail
| Person | Workable hours/year | Monthly wages | Monthly overhead | Monthly employee cost |
|---|
Combined Employee Hourly Labor Cost
This is the employee-cost baseline. It shows what the client would carry each month and each year if these two people were employees of the company, with employer overhead included. Under the contract, we carry our own insurance, travel costs, and payroll management.
Monthly wage cost
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$0
Monthly employer overhead
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$0
Total monthly employee cost
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$0
Total yearly employee cost
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$0
Contracted Information
Enter the monthly contract rate to compare our contracted cost against the employee-cost baseline above.
Monthly company overhead
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$0
Total monthly contracted cost
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$0
Total yearly contracted cost
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$0
Total labor hours included
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0 hours
Readiness-paid hours
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0 hours
Readiness-covered hours included
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0 hours
Readiness value included
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$0
Readiness-pay cushion before overpayment risk
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0 weeks each
Hours past readiness value
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0 hours
Overpayment risk value
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$0
Company Money Saved Or Lost
Company money saved per month
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$0
Company money saved/lost per year
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$0
Contract cost where savings stop
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$0
Client Message
- The monthly fee is based on expected productive labor, not a full 52 weeks of billing.
- Assumed time off, benefits, vehicles, tools, insurance, travel costs, payroll management, and support overhead are already part of the comparison.
- The goal is a predictable monthly support cost that stays fair against equivalent hourly labor.
- The contract normalizes payment by spreading the expected annual labor cost across all 12 months of the year.
- The readiness-pay cushion shows the point where the fixed contract has paid for expected work capacity and readiness to respond. Pricing above that point means the client may be paying for capacity that is not expected to be used under the assumed time off inputs.
- The contract helps keep the contractors work-ready and focused on quality. Fixing problems correctly the first time means less time revisiting the same issues, more room for productive work and off-hours availability, and a predictable 12-month payment that is easier to budget for.
- All work is tracked through internal project management software for accountability, scheduling, institutional knowledge, and hardware tracking.
- Customers have access to tracked project information and current status. Primary contacts can review and approve necessary work packages before work proceeds.
Draft Scope Of Services
The intent of this contract is to provide steady technical coverage for the systems the company depends on, while keeping work visible, tracked, and approved through the customer portal.
Included Support Areas
- 24/7 system monitoring and incident response for covered systems.
- Servers, workstations, firewalls, switches, wireless, VPNs, and business-critical network equipment.
- Backups, recovery planning, monitoring, logging, security review, and practical hardening.
- Field infrastructure including wireless links, outdoor equipment, cameras, difficult site access, and connectivity troubleshooting.
- Small software tools, reporting, database integration, workflow automation, and internal systems that support operations.
How Work Is Managed
- Work is organized into tracked work packages with status, priority, scheduling, assigned responsibility, notes, and related time.
- Customer contacts can view project information, current status, submitted tickets, and work package history.
- Primary contacts can approve work packages that require approval before deployment or major changes proceed.
- Time and focus work are recorded for accountability, institutional knowledge, hardware tracking, and future troubleshooting.
Contract Philosophy
- The fixed monthly rate is meant to provide predictable support, not create hidden hourly billing surprises.
- Preventive work, documentation, and clean repairs are prioritized because solving problems correctly reduces repeat issues.
- The company benefits from available technical capacity without carrying payroll, insurance, travel, vehicle, tool, and management overhead directly.
Separate Approval Items
- Major hardware purchases, licensing, third-party services, large deployments, and material project changes should be approved before purchase or implementation.
- Emergency work may begin when needed to protect operations, but it should still be documented and reviewed afterward.
- Anything outside the agreed support scope should be identified clearly before it becomes extra billable work.