A block of days you direct, a fixed day a week for six months, or two days a week for a year. What changes between them is how much of my week you have and how long you have it for, not which parts of the job I am willing to do: the same person does the administration, the development and the architecture on all three.
A block of days you direct, on whatever you need most: configuration, development, promoting work to production, or working through a design. Best when somebody already covers the platform day to day and you need senior hands on a defined piece of work.
A named day in your diary every week for six months, and somebody to ring on the days between. When a business critical process stops you get an answer within four business hours, and working out what is wrong is never charged to your days. For the months you are recruiting, covering leave, or settling an implementation down.
The same cover at twice the capacity, for a year. Two fixed days a week is enough to move a backlog rather than hold a line, and enough to carry the annual upgrade as planned work. A Bridge converts into a Run at any point, with the months already served counted toward the twelve.
The Bridge is £5,500 a month for six months, and that is the whole fee. It is not a pile of days: it is the days at a rate below the card, plus cover at £1,600 a month, which is the same on either term. Cover is the day held in your diary, the platform watched in between, the response times and the written report.
A day bought as it arises is £950, the rate card every Alchemist quotation uses. Committing to a term brings your day below it, and an extra day on a term is charged at the card. Production plus two instances are included; each further environment is £250 a month, because every one of them is another thing to patch, clone, keep in step and re-test after an upgrade.
There is no cap on how many people use your platform. What a term bounds is who can direct the work: two named contacts, changeable whenever you like, and five open items carrying a response time at once.
A critical process has stopped. Something your business depends on cannot run because of what is built on the platform: a flow, an integration, a change, custom code. Four business hours.
Degraded, blocked or urgent. Acknowledged within one business day, then we agree whether it waits for your day or displaces something on it.
Everything else. Requests, changes, questions and planned development. These are the reason the day exists, and they are done on it. If you need things before your day most weeks, you need a second day rather than a faster clock, and I will say so.
A response is an answer, not a fix: I have picked it up, started diagnosing, and you have my first assessment. Business hours are 09:00 to 17:00 UK.
If the instance itself is down, that is ServiceNow's to restore. ServiceNow hosts and runs the platform, so the availability of your instance is theirs under your subscription, not something I control or will price as if I did. What is mine is everything built on it, which is where the four hours apply. When an instance stops answering I confirm the fault is theirs rather than something on the platform, chase it with Now Support alongside you, and check what is running when it comes back.
They do, and they are not the same purchase. A month of a Bridge is £5,500, and it splits like this.
So the days are cheaper on a term - £900 against the £950 rate card a Consult block is priced at. The £1,600 is the part a block has none of.
Buy Consult if somebody already covers the platform day to day and you need senior hands on a defined piece of work. You will get more days for the money and you should.
Buy the Bridge if the honest answer to who deals with it when a business critical process stops on a Tuesday morning is nobody. That is what the cover is, and a block of days does not contain it at any price.
Consult carries no response times and nothing runs between blocks. A term answers within four business hours when a process has stopped, watches the platform every day in between, and never charges the diagnosis to your days.
Most platforms that need a standing day have just been implemented and have nobody in post to run them. An implementation is quoted separately, fixed price, once the scope is agreed - and a Bridge follows it with no assessment to run and no fortnight of reading, because the person holding the day is the person who designed the platform.
Implementation, fixed price. Then the Bridge from the month it goes live, which is when a first year of tuning starts: the things nobody could have known until real tickets went through it. The £2,500 assessment is waived.
What an implementation coversA Consult block needs no assessment either, because it carries no service level and you direct it. It is the cheapest way to find out whether we work well together, and the days are not wasted if you go no further: the closing handover tells you what is on your platform whatever you decide next.
Connect is pointed at your instance, all nine audits run, and you get the findings scored and ranked with a walkthrough. About two weeks. It tells you what is true about your platform, and it tells us both whether a standing day is the right size for it. Required before a Bridge or a Run, because a response time on a platform I have not read is a promise made blind. Not needed for a Consult block, which carries no service level. Not refundable and not credited against the term. Free if I built your instance.