There is a company out here that called me several days ago in regards to their service. I will summarize their business model. They charge by the ticket and c

There is a company out here that called me several days ago in regards to their service. I will summarize their business model. They charge by the ticket and complexity of the issue. I.e. If they open a ticket for application support it starts at $10.00 per ticket. If the ticket takes over 2-hours to complete it increases to $20.00. If it goes over 6-hours then it increases to $25.00. At 12-hours it is $40.00. If the ticket isn't resolved in 12-hours they bite the bullet and have to figure it out. For backup/maintenance/monitoring they create and implement a system that automates all this. They spend 10 hours a week updating/monitoring on their low-level package which costs $50.00. If you want to upgrade to premium support meaning they work on yours and only yours for those 10-hours then they charge 100% of the fee. They also allow you to buy hours in bulk and then transfer the hours over billing cycles. So you can buy 100 hours of application support. This would let you set it at any level free of charge. Their pricing is a little hard to understand so I don't recommend it but then again on a pay-per-use basis I guess it is the only way. They also charge by the level of the ticket. They have Low, Medium, High, and Urgent. If you decide your ticket is low priority you pay the rates I discussed above. If you escalate each level increases your support ticket costs by 25%. The Urgent level is an increase of 50%. So for application support general ticket, $10.00. Update it to Urgent would cost $23.50. ((($10.00 * 1.25) * 1.25) * 1.5)