Fee Schedule

Look around this website. There are nearly 2,000 pages here. Many show a long history of knowing my areas of interest in Windows better than anyone else who has published on them, of correcting what Microsoft writes, and of documenting what Microsoft doesn’t. You will rarely see anywhere such a commitment to precision and reliability. Get this working for you when your own Windows programmers are stuck or you’d prefer to have a Windows expert do the programming.

This fee schedule applies from 1st October 2016. All fees are denominated in U.S. dollars.

If you don’t like these rates, take them merely as a guide and make me an offer. I have always been open to working at much reduced rates, and even for free, if you present a very interesting problem or if you compromise on intellectual-property rights, e.g., by letting me publish results to my own website (after a time, perhaps) or by agreeing to put my name to anything you publish from the work. Or just look like you’re not going to burden me with overheads.

To get your consultation under way, write to consult@geoffchappell.com. Please take care to introduce yourself and set out your problem’s details as carefully as you yet know them.

It is only my opinion, of course, but I regard my rates as reasonable, and even as low. Please consider that each hour I apply specifically to your problem, whose solution is presumably to your commercial benefit, very likely draws from many more hours of research that I have undertaken entirely speculatively and must continue with, intensively, when not working just for you. To some extent, when you consult me about your particular problem, you become a sponsor of my research in general and pay for a share of my training. You might employ a superb programmer, albeit a generalist, for a cost to you each week that’s perhaps only a quarter of my weekly rate—yes, even in New York or San Francisco—but to develop and keep an expert programmer you will need to keep paying that lower rate for very many times more hours than you pay me, and you’ll lose many of those hours to their training and of your hours for organising that.

Casual Work

The standard rate for small work items such as casual questions and crash-dump analyses is $500 per hour. A minimum of one hour applies. After that, time is counted in decimal parts of hours.

Experience shows that casual work often comes with overheads and follow-up that add up in time but which aren’t easily counted as billable. Time spent on incidentals such as unpacking and repacking, and making telephone calls to arrange shipment is time spent on your behalf and is billable. This time can almost always be reduced more economically for you and less frustratingly for both of us by careful organisation from your side.

Advance Purchase

Work that would usually count as casual can be obtained for $450 per hour if you purchase 40 or more hours in advance to use or lose within six months.

Bulk Discount

A discount rate of $450 per hour is available if you establish a reasonable expectation of providing well-organised problems for at least 40 hours per month over six months or more.

Projects and Reports

Of course, 40 hours as 40 one-hour problems or even 20 two-hour problems is very different from 40 hours as one uninterrupted work item. Because I very much prefer the latter the rates for larger work items are very much lower.

The rate for reports and projects is $3,200 daily and $15,000 weekly, based on 8-hour days and 5-day weeks. Partial days and weeks are billed as whole. Excess hours for long days and excess days for long weeks are billed pro rata.

Scheduling

Please note that although I respond quickly to commercial problems, especially for emergencies, my ability to schedule whole days, let alone weeks, is sometimes limited. The longer the term, the more you should expect a delay before I can arrange your work around other work. To secure my attention or availability, consider a retainer.

Estimates

I will try to quote a price for a well-specified self-contained problem. I will not engage in refining your specification as part of a quote. I will not accept responsibility for time that depends on other people, e.g., to gather information or agree on interfaces.

Experience has shown that problems are often brought to me only because they have already shown a capacity to surprise even the brightest of programmers. For such problems, it is rarely sensible to estimate even to within a factor of two. More typical is that I can be no less vague than to estimate whether your work will take a few hours, a few days or a few weeks.

Terms

Payment is due 14 days from invoicing. Payment is to be made by direct deposit into a bank account that will be specified on the invoice. Payments from outside the U.S. are to be transferred telegraphically in U.S. dollars at the sender’s expense. I may require part-payment in advance of starting any work.

You will in fact be consulting Geoff Chappell Ltd, incorporated in New York State. Unless otherwise agreed, all work will be done by Geoff Chappell specifically, who speaks here for the company.

I happily agree to non-disclosure of anything I learn about your software and methods. I anyway take my clients’ confidentiality as understood. I also happily agree that any software or reports that I write for you are works for hire in terms of copyright, but your bill will be lower and my enthusiasm about working for you will be greater if you allow me to incorporate my own headers and libraries without your claiming ownership of them. If in the course of working on your software I invent something, such that you can patent it, then I renounce all interest.

Note, however, that very little software stands in isolation. That you think to consult me very likely means that you at least perceive some trouble between your software and some other software, notably Windows. Anything that I learn about any other software while working on your software’s interaction with it is my professional development, not your intellectual property (as much as it can be anyone’s). Unless you are specifically commissioning research into Windows, then any attempt by you to claim ownership of discoveries and know-how about Windows can only mean that I can’t risk applying any such knowledge to your problem and your benefit.

If you require me to agree to your standard terms, then please review them before sending them to me, and ensure that any overheads you would impose on me are meaningful, productive and even essential for both your business and mine. You will get a lower bill from me, as a consequence of more energetic, enthusiastic and concentrated effort on your behalf, if you look like you appreciate letting me get stuck into the work that I specialise in: that, not my indulgence of overheads, is what you’d be consulting me for, isn’t it?