All hourly services provided by Compustar that are not covered under a Computing Assurance Plan are billed at a rate of $90 per hour of service provided, with a minimum charge of $45 and billing is calculated in 30 minute increments. Beyond that initial 30 minutes of onsite time spent by a technician, we bill clients based on the amount of time of actual service performed, not including time spent on research, chatting with a client or waiting for extensive periods of time for progress bars to complete. We feel that billing for service performed should be based on value delivered, not total billable hours spent by a technician.
As an example, most onsite services performed are completed in under 90 minutes, and it is common practice to charge for one hour of billable time in these cases. It is also common practice for extensive services to have a technician onsite for three hours or more, yet we only bill for two hours of service. In some rare instances involving truly extensive work performed for a client, or in cases in which a multitude of issues are tackled at once, we will bill that client three or four hours or more depending on the situation and the value provided to the client. In all cases, progress in issue resolution, prioritization of services to be performed and expected billing are maintained through open lines of communication with the client throughout the service.