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This page sets out the complete terms for the Consulting Retainer, our ongoing flexible support plan available as an add-on to any package, or on its own. If you're comparing packages, the short version lives on our Packages page - this is the full detail behind it.
These terms form part of your service agreement with Eclipse Solutions and apply alongside our general Terms & Conditions.
Consulting Retainer: How It Works
You handle your own day to day IT, so this isn't a helpdesk. It's the layer above: a secure, well maintained environment, a professional who owns and monitors it, and someone to check with before any IT decision. We're leaner than a big firm and honest about it, which is why we're priced well under the standard NZ market rate of $130 to $180+ per user per month.
Pricing
1 to 2 users
$250/month (minimum)
5 users
~$425/month
10 users
~$700/month
All prices exclude GST. A billable user is any employee or contractor whose account or access we administer in any way. This arrangement is designed for teams up to 15 users; at 15 we'll review it together to make sure it still fits.
What's Included
Monthly Health Check
Security alerts, sign-in activity, MFA and Conditional Access, licences and storage, reviewed monthly with a short written summary.
Advisory Access
Unlimited reasonable questions and decisions about your IT, acknowledged by the end of the next business evening.
Change-Hours Pool
A monthly pool of hours for minor changes, new users, permission tweaks, licence assignments. Unused hours roll over to a cap of 3× your monthly allowance.
User & Group Admin
Onboarding and offboarding staff handled properly as you grow, so access stays clean and secure.
Documentation
Your environment kept documented and current, useful if you're ever audited or need to hand it to someone else.
Quarterly Check-In
A strategic review each quarter, so someone is actively thinking about whether your IT still fits where the business is going.
Change-hours rules. The pool covers minor changes only, things like adding a user, a permission tweak, or a licence assignment. Migrations, device management rollouts, backup and disaster recovery setup, and anything that needs real planning or carries delivery risk are always scoped and quoted as a separate project, regardless of your banked hours. If a request needs more than your pool in a given month, extra work is billed at our standard hourly rate once we've confirmed it with you first, never quietly absorbed or left waiting.
Free onboarding, month one. Before your first monthly fee is charged, we document and baseline your environment: user accounts and licences, security configuration, file structure, a critical access and recovery register, and a plain-English guide to how to reach us and what to expect. We finish with a short kickoff session to walk through it together. This documents what already exists, it doesn't build anything new, that's what makes the ongoing fee feel earned from day one.
Response commitment. We acknowledge new requests by the end of the next business evening (Monday to Friday, excluding NZ public holidays). This is an acknowledgement target, not a resolution guarantee, and this plan does not include 24/7 or same-day cover. If your business needs guaranteed rapid response, we can arrange paid third-party emergency cover as an add-on until we're at the scale to offer it ourselves. We would rather be upfront about this than promise something we can't consistently deliver.
Out of scope. Migrations, backup and disaster recovery, device management (Intune), major incident recovery, and integrations are never included in the monthly fee, they're scoped and quoted as separate projects. After-hours emergency work isn't offered directly, but can be arranged through a third-party add-on. As a retained client, any project work is billed at our discounted rate of $130/hour, instead of our standard $140/hour.
Standard Terms
Payment. Invoiced monthly in advance, due by the 20th of the following month, excluding GST. Microsoft licences, domain renewals and similar third-party costs are your own cost, billed by the vendor directly, we advise and administer, we don't mark them up or absorb them.
Term and cancellation. Month-to-month, no lock-in. Either side may end the arrangement with 30 days' written notice. On exit, you get a clean handover of documentation, credentials and admin access. Banked change-hours expire on cancellation and aren't refundable as cash.
Annual review. Our fees are reviewed annually and may be adjusted with 30 days' notice to reflect changes in scope, costs or market rates.
This is a plain-English summary of our standard terms, not a substitute for the signed agreement you'll receive when you sign up, which sets out the full liability and data handling terms.