Officially – we publish our DBA as a Service pricing because we’d rather you know what this costs and how it works before we ever get on a sales call. Unofficially? I put the pricing up there because I HATE looking for a service and seeing “contact us for pricing.” I know what’s coming next, and I’m not looking forward to it.
Our pricing for our Remote DBA service is deliberately pretty simple: one quarterly price, one pool of DBA hours, and a set of services that come with the relationship whether you use every hour or not.
The number itself is the easy part and that doesn’t take a lot of time on calls with potential customers to sort through, but what people usually want to understand is what that number actually buys, what uses their hours, what doesn’t, and what happens when their needs change.
So I’ll try and answer most of those questions here. I don’t mind answering them in the calls also, but I like solutioning and sorting out relationship fit and figuring out the specific challenges on the calls and if we can answer a few questions ahead of time with some posts and videos, that’s more time to talk about the unique challenges.
I talk a bit more about the philosophy (and my extreme dislike for “contact us for pricing details” on a website in the above video.
This post is Part of our Buying DBA Services series: We’re sharing what we’ve learned from inside the managed DBA business over the years to help you understand the costs, tradeoffs, problems, and questions to ask before choosing a provider. The goal is to help you make the right decision, whether that means hiring Straight Path, another DBA company, an internal DBA, or nobody at all.
How much does Straight Path’s DBA as a Service cost?
It’s on the DBA as a Service page but as of today:
- Micro: $6,000/quarter for 10 hours, overage hours are $295/hr.
- Silver: $10,000/quarter for 25 hours, overage hours are $275/hr.
- Gold: $14,000/quarter for 45 hours, overage hours are $265/hr.
- Diamond: $19,000/quarter for 75 hours, overage hours are $250/hr.
Gold and Diamond let you roll forward hours, all levels get the same monitoring and full team relationship, all have access to us after hours. Silver and up start with a Senior DBA owning the relationship, Micros are owned by the amazing DBAs on our support team. But the full team serves all clients – we don’t gatekeep you from the right resource based on your level. More details are on the pricing page.
Why do you charge quarterly instead of monthly?
We actually started pricing monthly way back when – but a few things hit:
- More overhead – it was a LOT more to track and send invoices.
- We made more money from overage from clients in some months while other months had hours left over – a lot can change month to month.
- We wanted more stability in the billing for our client and a bit more time to be proactive.
Monthly is too much churn and too hard to predict. Quarterly can be difficult for some clients but it tends to be the right cycle for natural ebbs and flows in a relationship and normalizes over the 3 months. Some clients wind up on semi-annual and annual plans and for many clients that works well – for some it’s a bit too far out to predict if they don’t have a great annual forecast of work and are going through changes.
Why don’t you price DBA as a Service by the number of SQL Server instances?
Instance count just doesn’t really equate to workload. The age old SQL Server DBA answer to every question is “It depends” – and that really applies to a question like “how busy is one instance?” We have a few clients with a single SQL Server instance who are easily Diamonds forever because of all the important work, help with tuning and SQL Dev work they need, and some that have scores of instances with or without a DBA that can get by on Silver or even Micro. We charge by hours and we let folks change levels quarter by quarter based on needs. This really has worked well.
What is included in the quarterly price?
- Monitoring of their entire estate – daily health checks, alerts as they happen that are watched by our triage team M-F 8AM to 5PM no charges for the tools to be there or the daily health review summary our team looks at and sends or the alert triage. We bill when we get connected.
- A single instance of SQL sentry monitored (more available at our discount – priced with a really steep discount – we aren’t a software reseller – we’re just passing on a discount we get for buying in bulk)
- A staffed on-call team and escalations.
- A lead DBA and access to some of the best of the best DBAs (and access to CDO services, Azure architecture and more with Buck on the team)
What actually uses my included DBA hours?
Whatever you need. I guess you could simply just say, work. We sometimes get calls asking “what about if it’s emergency work? what if it’s proactive? Is it different for reactive? What if it’s reactive but it’s a Tuesday? What if it’s after hours patching work? What if it’s project work vs fix it work?
We don’t play that game here. For two reasons. One because it’s confusing as heck for the customers and a strange service model. The other? Because I don’t want to have to track all of that. If we’re connecting and doing work or talking to you about things or in a meeting – we’re billing in 15 minute increments.
After hours work is still billed in 15-minute increments, but we start the clock at an hour then go to 15 minute increments. So theoretically, if something after hours only took 45 minutes, an hour is deducted from the retainer – but I can’t think of many after hours things that are 30 minute things by the time you get connected, load the ticket, confirm the plan, test the work, etc.
Why does Micro have a higher effective hourly rate than Silver, Gold, or Diamond?
There is a fixed cost to ever DBA as a Service relationship. We don’t do a “monitoring only” plan – but if we did we’d see a bit more normalization between the levels. The things like the monitoring infrastructure and support and dev team and security, our own security and audit compliance, the back office, the team reviewing the alerts and doing the daily health checks that aren’t billing clients for hours. We’re paying for the team to be on-call whether they get a call or not. Mentoring and training. All of these costs are baked into what we do as a company but the fixed client service costs like the alerting and tooling – that has a bit less room to “hide” when a plan like Micro has 10 hours per quarter.
What happens if I don’t use all of my hours?
For the Micro and Silver tiers – we don’t have rollover, but we also don’t like a client losing hours. These plans are really “up to” plans but we do our best to use all of the hours. We have monthly check-in calls and report the hours, we review things, we have a heavy focus on proactive support and catching things before they go bad – and we escalate and keep calling if we aren’t getting feedback. We want to be the most valuable partner that each of our clients work with – and we pride ourselves on winning the best in service award from Clearly Rated, the folks who do our independent surveys. We love it when a client tells us that we’re a partner, not a vendor. We do our best to use the hours.
For Gold and Diamond we have rollover available 10 and 25 hours respectively.
And when a client consistently uses less hours – our leads suggest a downgrade if there are no plans to use them in the future.
What happens if I use more hours than my plan includes?
Every client can purchase overage. We never assume overage either. When a client gets close on hours, their lead DBA sends them a note saying they are burning at a higher rate than their level is at and we ask for which stance they’d like us to take. Allow us to consume up to some number of hours overage at the overage rate (we don’t bill it then – we just get a limit and approval and then bill only what’s used at the end of the quarter.), save some for emergencies, allow only emergency overage, or hold work at the level.
Each level has different overage rates as described above and on the pricing page.
The overage rates are a lot less expensive than the Bucket of Hours rates. This isn’t to punish a bucket of hours client, but it’s to optimize for the relationship – and with an existing DBA as a Service client, we’re often able to better plan and predict and even head off some of the work because we’re really part of their team. I think of it as our clients on DBA as a Service are in some sort of a membership with us. (That said when a bucket of hours gets usage up high – we’ll often offer price breaks and relationship breaks.)
We also will look at an emergency or faster than planned usage as a way to really optimize for the relationship. We try and be creative when it makes sense and let a client upgrade their next quarter and steal ahead (we make a bit less for the overage – but we haven’t profited off of a big emergency – leaving overage for the 10-20 hours above and beyond that happen from time to time not a true increase in workload where the next level just makes sense.)
Why don’t you charge different rates for projects, emergencies, performance tuning, upgrades, patching, and other types of DBA work?
I don’t want a client wondering “shoot which SKU of work is this before I call?!” I want them thinking of us as their partner, in it for them – with them – and if it’s work – it’s just being billed in 15 minute increments. Back when I was on the ambulance as a volunteer – I loved patient care and figuring stuff out and stabilizing a crisis – I really, hated the paperwork. Imagine all of the paperwork and work we’d have to do to have a million different rates based on a flow chart of ideas. Nah… If we’re working with you – we’re billing the retainer in 15 minute increments. Case closed.
(That said after hours support calls are assessed a $500 fee – one and two calls are waived a year for Gold and Diamond) We pride ourselves on getting few calls – the fee is at the right level to be worth it for an emergency, but a bit too high for a “stubbed toe” – the reason we don’t get the calls isn’t the fee – it’s our proactive stance – we like to setup an environment for success ahead of time and focus so hard on prevention.
Can I just buy a bucket of consulting hours instead?
Absolutely.
Buckets of hors list today for $7,000 for 20 hours and we just moved the pricing to $12,000 if a client buys 40 hours at a time. The hours are good until they are exhausted or for a year, whichever comes first. We bill those in 15 minute increments also.
Buckets are great if you don’t want monitoring, if you don’t need alerting, if you don’t need a support team to call – we are getting fewer of our team members access and the work is planned work where we are helping with a defined project, some tuning, a health check and fixes afterwards.
The buckets of hours are NOT for support or break fix after hours or with the 15-minute P1 response (though we still try and help where we can and when we can – the buckets are optimized for project work that is planned and no real DBA support.)
If you just need hours and not support and relationship – just buy the hours.
How do you decide which DBA as a Service level I should start with?
Normally on a call with a potential customer, right about now I’d wet my finger and put it up to the wind and say “it’s a bit of a guessing game.” And, yeah, I really do that far too much (with clean hands!!)
But we kind of “figure it out” on the call. We hear about the pain points, the size of the environment, the size of the team monitoring it, the answers to questions and we take all of the clients we’ve served who feel and look like you and we are able to narrow it down fairly accurately. Onboarding is taken out of those hours also so we talk about the onboarding process – more pain = more time to manage and setup accounts and PAM tools and MFAs and second and tertiary accounts.
But we also tend to optimize for a higher level for the first quarter and we just tell the client if you go with Gold or Diamond based on what it feels like – and we bit off to many hours we’ll give you a one time courtesy rollover – you can rollover all unused hours instead of the 10 or 25 to the next quarter – so we de-risk it and if the hours are used the way we expect (and, usually, they are) we saved them overage, made a little less margin and were able to really help.
But it’s an estimate- and we get it wrong sometimes and that’s why I love running a small company where I’m the sales guy, customer experience officer and founder – we figure it out and make it right. But we’ve been doing this for a long time and we get it right more often than not.
Are your DBAs incentivized to use all of my hours?
They are incentivized to serve you, make you feel protected and cared for, the NPS score of their customers in our annual review, and living to our values (Trust360, Generosity, Humility, Ownership mentality.) So they are incentivized to serve you. That means use the hours we have, not just go into overage because we can and try and blend proactive work to reactive needs and to your budget. If they think more hours are needed they’ll tell you – if the budget is there to go up a level we’ve saved you from overage and keep working, if the budget is a tier lower, we titrate to effect.
We like long-term client relationships and we have lower churn rates of team and customers and I want to keep it that way. We don’t want to bill for solving the same alarm over and over again, we don’t want to actually have you use on-call – and we want to make sure we get what needs to get done and we’ll tell you if your hours are too high or too low – but we’ll respect the budget. It’s absolutely an amazing sign of success when we see a client start at Diamond, move to Gold and then live at Silver because we’ve solved many of their challenges for real – it just means I have to have a few more sales calls when we do it, but so be it.
Can I move between service levels?
Absolutely – we need 30 days’ notice to move levels. We suggest down or upgrades based on what we see and we work with you to pick the right option.
Do I have to sign a long-term contract?
No. Heck no. We once had a client – someone I used to work with and wanted our service – need to wait some time before he could break a contract with another, bigger DBA as a Service client, or pay some exorbitant fee. That reminds me of a scene I hated when I had a summer job. I was working at a beach side store on the east coast – in my small town. And we made fried clams and the owner got after me once because I didn’t properly “fold the bottom of the box up” – basically we were instructed to squeeze the bottom of the box for each size where the boxes were made – it meant the bottom was now I don’t know 1 inch? half an inch higher? And at a point so this mean that maybe 2-3 less fried clams (or scallops or whatever) would fit in the box. I didn’t like it – and I asked what if the customers notice? He pointed to the beach and said “every single day we get how many new people here? and we’re the store here – where are they going to go? and I don’t need repeat business it’s new folks every year.”
A lot of our values and approach to business are informed by crap I’ve had to deal with or don’t like at places. The long term contracts is 100% there as well. Stay because you like us, because we’ve earned your renewal. If we haven’t? Then we don’t deserve your business. We need 30 days’ notice to leave us, too. With no penalty (though you may have to suffer through a call with Evan, our COO, and I to learn lessons and make sure there’s nothing we can do to make it better.
What happens after hours?
We do planned work after hours all the time as described above with the hours. If it’s an emergency you call our on-call number. 888-SQL-DATA and press option 2 and you talk to our answering service who then calls our on-call DBA. They have 5 minutes to answer or they get called again. After the second 5 minutes they call the backup. After 5 minutes there they call Evan or I. The team doesn’t want Evan or I called – usually the backup never has to get called – and then our team member is on with you. Our SLA is to be on a call within 15 minutes of you calling and to be able to be online working with you within an hour at the worst (the team covers for each other and we often will have folks jump in even if not on-call – we all get an e-mail when the on-call number is first called – and Evan, Sheila, and I get a text and we all watch… We sometimes trip over each other to help – but I’d rather it be that way.)
What should I compare when I’m looking at another DBA provider’s price?
Don’t just compare the number.
Ask the questions above. Ask questions like:
- What is included in the base price?
- What consumes hours?
- What doesn’t consume hours?
- Is monitoring included?
- Who actually reviews the monitoring?
- What happens when an alert fires?
- What happens after hours?
- Are emergencies billed differently?
- Is project work billed differently?
- What happens if I don’t use everything?
- Can I change service levels?
- Who actually works on my SQL Servers?
- Who owns the relationship?
- What is explicitly NOT included?
- What happens if I decide to leave?
Evaluate the answers, see how you fit with them and pick the best fit for your needs out of a few providers.
Which Straight Path DBA as a Service level is right for me?
Micro
Micro clients are the one client with two major differences:
- You have a Support Team DBA as your primary DBA.
- You have to allow us to use a shared access methodology (which is secure, MFA, etc and we are happy to describe that on the call with you.)
Micro is great if you want the monitoring, the relationship, the ability to flex up. Maybe you have a small environment – and are growing and want someone there with you. Maybe you have a DBA team and want coverage. We’ve thought about renaming this service to Essentials – all of our tools – our full team – we keep the lights on but don’t have a ton of hours to go deep with the proactive.
Silver
You need between 15-25 hours a quarter and have enough complexity to need that Senior DBA relationship and you want us to have time to be proactive and keep ahead of things in your smaller environment.
Gold
This is 45 hours a quarter and has one on-call fee per year waived and rollover available. This is where we start getting to busier environments, a bit more going on and the hours are needed – we’re doing more tuning and performance work , helping do a lot of future proofing. You may or may not have a DBA team. We’ve thought about renaming this level to Professional one day and maybe finding some number of hours that would make Silver and Gold turn into it- The main difference to Silver is the hours but it’s not that huge of a leep -but it saves you $1,500 a quarter in overage if you need to go over.
Diamond
You need 75 or more hours a quarter, we’re doing a lot more work and there is more complexity. We’ve thought about renaming this to “Enterprise” one day. You’d get two on-call fees waived per year.
A bucket of hours
I talked about that above – but really you just need the work, don’t need or want the monitoring, the ongoing reviews and relationships and SLAs – but you’d love the expertise that comes from a team like ours.
The short version
Our DBA as a Service pricing is designed around the amount of DBA work and coverage you actually need, not simply the number of SQL Server instances you own or any other metrics that are really open to interpretation.
You pay one quarterly price. You get a pool of DBA hours plus the monitoring, tooling, coverage, and team infrastructure that comes with the service. We don’t have different rates for different tickets or access to the “good SLA”. It’s just a pool of hours for you to use how you need.
If you need more, we can use overage or move you up. If you consistently need less, we can move you down.
And if you don’t need an ongoing managed relationship at all, we’ll happily sell you a bucket of consulting hours instead.
The goal isn’t to put every company into the biggest DBA as a Service plan we can sell.
It’s to figure out what kind of DBA help you actually need and price the relationship accordingly and grow with you even if as the relationship grows the hours may drift down because of what we’ve accomplished. That’s success.
Still not sure which option fits?
That’s normal. We don’t expect you to diagnose your own DBA workload before talking to us. If you reach out, we’ll ask about your environment, your team, what keeps breaking, what’s coming up, and what you actually want help with. Sometimes we’ll recommend DBA as a Service. Sometimes we’ll recommend a bucket. And sometimes we’ll tell you that what you really need is to hire somebody. Book some time with me or reach out – we don’t have a sales team or sales process – we have a conversation and see if we’re right for each other.