Best Options For Recurring Developer Income?

As a Freelance developer, what's the best way to get recurring income?

Things like maintenance plans, monthly hosting packages, etc. I'd love to hear what's worked and what didn't for you!

Comments

[Ionut Staicu]

Maintenace and retainer contracts worked well.

The maintenance basically means that the client has the site/server up to date, backed up and so on, priority support and so on, with a limit of X hours/month.

The retainer is some kind of „reservation” of certain amount of hours/month, that may or may not be needed.

I avoid providing hosting (and usually things I don't control) because the benefits are minimum compared to the potential headaches if anything when something goes south. I do recommend various services or hosting to my clients, but that's totally up to them if they get it or not.

[Teku]

I've set to automate as much as I can with hosting and backups so that I can charge a flat monthly/annual fee for all my hosting with minimal intervention on my part. This has been a great recurring income source. A lot of people avoid hosting but when done right you barely have to deal with anything other than securing the backups and making sure DNS is correct. I used to work out maintenance contracts but when I was not in control of the hosting I could never guarantee anything and I was always fighting a losing battle.

There are numerous services that offer very simplified hosting that works with VPS hosts to allow for automated deployment and setup. This reduces a lot of the normal maintenance you would find if you tried to roll your own hosting.

The point is that you want to reduce the things you are not good at and focus on what you are good at.