I’m trying something new; unlimited expert (consultant) support for NixOS for a flat monthly fee 
The target demographic: small or mid-sized organizations that would like to run a Nix or NixOS deployment, but that cannot justify hiring a full-time expert (yet).
The pitch:
- All support is by e-mail, you can ask an unlimited amount of questions.
- The questions/problems can be of any difficulty. If I don’t know the answer, I will figure it out for you.
- Complete answers/solutions are guaranteed (subject to the laws of physics
), as long as the topic is Nix/NixOS or its ecosystem. Javascript questions are also in scope. Other topics are best-effort. - You should expect in-depth explanations of how and why something works (unless requested otherwise), not just “do this, do that”.
- I will aim to fully answer the question in the first reply (assuming you provide all the details of the problem right away, of course).
- The SLA is ‘best-effort’; I’ll typically check for new e-mails one or several times each working day, but this is not guaranteed.
- That’s because I will be handling all support questions myself, they will not be outsourced.
- The flat-fee contract only includes e-mail based ticket support; other forms of support (live chat, custom development, etc.) are available on request for an additional fee.
- The price is per-organization, as long as you don’t have some absurd number of people (eg. 500 employees) sending me tickets. For large organizations, we’ll have to figure something out.
The price: 2000 EUR/month ex. VAT, but there is some room for negotiation if the circumstances require it. Additional services are available for an additional fee. Payment is month-to-month, and there is no minimum contract term.
How is this sustainable? Answers are not instant. Because there is no guaranteed response time, it usually only makes sense to hand me a problem that you can’t figure out yourself - for simple questions, a search query will usually get you results much faster. This should naturally reduce the amount of questions that end up in my inbox, because if someone sends me hundreds of questions a day, all they’ll be doing is blocking the really important ones behind the simple ones.
That having been said, this is a new thing for me - for that reason, I’m initially only looking to take on a single customer for this service (not counting another potential external lead), so that I can catch any issues in the process early before it becomes overwhelming. This also means that as the first customer, you’ll have relatively much input on how to change the process to make it work better for you.
How to take me up on the offer:
- E-mail me at info@ossworks.nl
- Or send me a DM on here
Of course, if you have any questions, you can also ask them here in the thread if you prefer that.
Exclusions: Note that I will not do business with the following industries (and their subsidiaries):
- Cryptocurrency
- Defense contractors
- LLMs
Conflict-of-interest statement: I do not expect this work to introduce a significant conflict of interest with my involvement in the community. Because my income does not scale with the amount of questions, I do not stand to benefit from introducing unnecessary complexity into the project, nor from eg. reducing documentation quality. I do not see any obvious way in which a negative contribution to the project or community could benefit me in my role as a support provider. The work also does not provide me with control over governance.