The usual way to sell automation is by project: agree a scope, build the flow, hand it over with documentation, invoice. Clean, bounded, easy to quote.
And it almost always ends the same way. Six months later someone renames a column, Microsoft updates a connector, the person whose account authenticated the connection leaves, or a case nobody anticipated comes in. The flow fails silently — that's the worst thing about flows, they fail silently — and the company goes back to doing it by hand. Months after that, nobody remembers it ever existed.
That's why my model is a setup fee plus a monthly fee for staying responsible for the process.
It isn't support, it's ownership
On a support contract, you notice something has failed and you email me. In this model I'm the one watching: I review run histories, I see the failures before anyone else does, and I fix what needs fixing without opening a conversation about whether it was in scope.
The difference isn't the price, it's whose alarm goes off.
What the fee covers:
- Monitoring the flows and their failed runs.
- Incidents and fixes, with no argument about whether they were foreseen.
- Minor changes: a new field, one more recipient, a wording that no longer holds.
- Living documentation, updated when something changes.
What it doesn't cover, and gets quoted separately: a new process, or an extension that changes the shape of the circuit.
How it changes what I build
This is the part you can't see from outside. When you know you'll be living with what you build, you build differently.
You stop taking the shortcut that works today and breaks once the list grows, because you're the one getting that call. You document properly, because in eight months you're the one reading it. You avoid the tool of the moment that may not exist next year. And you stop authenticating flows with the personal account of whoever happened to be at the keyboard, because you know exactly what happens when that person changes jobs.
A fixed-scope project rewards finishing fast. A monthly fee rewards the phone not ringing again. Those are opposite incentives, and it shows in the work.
The fair objection
"So it's in your interest to make it complicated, so I depend on you."
It's a fair objection, and the answer is the same for everyone: the documentation is yours from day one, the flows live in your environment and not mine, and the connections can move to a company service account whenever you want. If one day you decide to bring it in-house or hand it to someone else, I hand it over with the map.
What you're paying for isn't a hostage, it's not having to think about it.
Who it fits
This works well for companies of roughly ten to two hundred people, with a critical process that currently depends on someone remembering, and no intention of hiring a full-time technical person to watch it.
It doesn't fit if what you need is a one-off automation with no afterlife — a migration, a data dump — or if you already have an in-house Power Platform team. In those cases I say so, charge for the one-off work, and don't sell you a fee you won't use.