Maintenance is something for which you should definitely charge. How exactly you should charge for it depends on how much you value recurring revenue streams an

Maintenance is something for which you should definitely charge. How exactly you should charge for it depends on how much you value recurring revenue streams and how willing the client is to commit to recurring expenses. I have never done web-related consulting, but in my industry (VoIP), customers almost always expect ongoing support of the platform/system built for them, which is analogous to a full-on deliverable like a web site (as opposed to a small patch or tweak). The general thinking is that if customers want to be able to count on your responding to them in a timely manner for down-the-road support, they need to pay for that privilege; merely being willing to pay hourly on an as-needed basis is not enough. So, in our area of consulting, this is usually done on a flat-rate monthly retainer basis which entitles them to X hours per month of support at a discounted hourly equivalent rate (additional hours are billed at an overage rate which may or may not be higher), and it's use-it-or-lose-it; in other words, it's an insurance policy that you'll be there when they need you. The scope of such support is also confined to configuration tweaks and minor modifications; fully fledged additional product development is usually not included and is billed ad hoc at normal development rates. In some cases, if the retainer amount is sufficiently high, you can probably justify all-you-can-eat maintenance without limiting the hours, which can make customers feel better about not being billed through the nose for fixes for bugs/errors/omissions/defects, but as with any "unlimited" plan, it's also a great way to screw yourself with demanding customers that take full advantage of the buffet model. Still, it's how we do support for our product in our particular industry, because it allows us to charge a lot more per month. I don't know how much commitment of this sort can be extracted from clients in the web industry, since I don't know what sort of revenue can be directly attributed to the web site or how critical it is to any given business that has approached you. You can always just charge them on an hourly basis for any maintenance needed, which will sit better with customers that are resistant to recurring commitments of any sort. However, in that case, you should definitely not discount the rate; after all, they're not guaranteeing you any revenue, yet they're expecting you to drop whatever you're working on (which could, at some future moment, be quite large/lucrative/urgent) and help them. So, discounting is usually used to make the recurring approach more attractive. From a business perspective, I highly encourage the recurring revenue approach. It has much to recommend it for reasons of cash flow.