Premium MODX Support for agencies and independent developers

Since 2013, we've provided support for all of our Premium Extras. With Premium Support, we now offer the same level of support for all of MODX: including our open source Extras, third-party Extras, and all functionality in the core.

This service is perfect for agencies and independent developers who build sites in MODX for their clients. No matter your level of MODX expertise, we'll share ours whenever you need it.

Pricing is simple: €100/hour, billed quarterly.

Premium Support has a 24-hour response time. We aim to respond with a useful answer in less than a day.

Comparison of Standard and Premium support

How it works

1. Choose a plan

Premium Support is a subscription. Choose how many hours per month you'd like to reserve.

2. Get MODX help

When you have a problem or a MODX-related question, ask us and we'll answer in under 24 hours (on workdays).

3. Fair use policy

Get the support you need without having to worry about extra charges. See the FUP section for details.

4. Billed quarterly

The standard subscription fee is paid 3 months in advance. Overages (if any) are charged the following quarter.

Convinced already?
Enquire for more information

What's covered by Premium Support?

Stuck with a problem? Or want to know how best to accomplish a task? We can provide you with the answers and hands-on assistance you need. And thanks to a decade of MODX experience, we can help with a wide range of topics.

  • All our open source extras

    VersionX, MagicPreview, ClientConfig, ImportX, and Scheduler. We built them and know them best.

  • Standard MODX features

    Templating, using elements, system settings, manager customization, structuring your site…

  • Common third-party extras

    If it's open-source and has over 2,500 downloads on MODX.com, we can help. Even if its documentation is "in progress".

  • Development review & feedback*

    Wrote a snippet, plugin, or CMP? We'll gladly review it, help identify issues, and recommend improvements.

  • Minor custom development*

    Need help writing a snippet, plugin, or extending existing tools? We can usually help with small development projects (up to 3 hours of work) at short notice.

  • Access Control Lists (Permissions)

    Yes – it is possible to have a firm grasp of the permissions system in MODX – and we'll happily help you out.

  • Site lockout

    Found yourself locked out of your own MODX site? Given server-level access, we can help you get back in.

  • Audits & optimization*

    Looking to improve accessibility or performance? We can analyze a site for you and provide recommendations on what you can improve (and how).

Is the help you're looking for not listed here? Try us anyway. If we truly cannot help, we'll tell you, and it won't count towards your reserved time.

*This type of support or development typically needs to be scheduled in advance, as it may take a larger block of time than we can promise within the 24 hour response time. Subject to availability.

What's not covered by Premium Support?

To keep Premium Support both affordable and manageable, some things are not covered in Premium Support.

  • Hacked Site Cleanups

    We can help with prevention, but not a cleanup after a hack. If your site was hacked, we recommend contracting MODX. Thanks to their extensive experience, they can offer a fixed-fee cleanup service including a guarantee at a rate that we simply cannot.

  • Routine MODX & Extras upgrades

    Routine maintenance such as keeping MODX up-to-date is not part of Premium Support. (Although we have built an app that helps with that - check out SiteDash.)

  • Third-party premium extras

    If we can't inspect the source code of a third-party extra, our ability to provide support for it may be severely limited.

If you request help on a topic we really can't help you with, that of course does not count towards your monthly reserved time.

Interested in Premium Support?

Flexible Terms + Fair Use Policy

Your support needs will likely vary from one month to another. To manage with that without incurring extra charges, Premium Support comes standard with a flexible Fair Use Policy (FUP) and allows you to change your plan at the start of each 3-month billing period.

  • Monthly hours can be used throughout the quarter

    While hours are reserved monthly, they are available to you throughout the 3-month billing period. Spread them out evenly, or use them all on a single development task at once. Or a bit of both.

  • Minor overage? It's on us.

    If you only need a little bit of extra time (up to 33% of your reserved hours, or 17% for plans with 4+ reserved hours/mo), the extra time is on us. Our top priority is giving you quality support, not racking up extra charges.

  • Upgrade or downgrade your plan

    Let us know* if you want to reserve more or less hours, and we'll adjust your plan accordingly. You can upgrade each month, and downgrade each 3-month billing period. Minimum of 1 hour/mo, in 30-minute increments.

  • Cap usage, or charge for extra time? Your call.

    If you're exceeding the reserved time and fair use policy, extra time is charged at the end of your 3-month billing period at €125/hr. But if you'd rather not incur any extra charges, let us know* and we'll tell you time's up instead.

Sounds like a great deal, right? Here's how we keep it fair.

  • Hours don't roll over into the next quarter

    You need to use your reserved hours within the 3-month billing period, they don't roll over. If you have a lot of unspent time towards the end, consider scheduling some development or a site audit, or donating left-over time to one of our open source extras.

  • 6 month minimum commitment

    We want to get to know you and understand the best way to help you. That can take time, so each new support contract has a 6 month minimum commitment. If our services are no longer necessary, just let us know two weeks before the next 3-month billing period starts.

* To make changes to your plan, please let us know at least 2 weeks before your next 3-month billing period starts.

Questions & answers

If you're convinced and want modmore to back you up with a decade of MODX experience, please email us to get the process started. 

If you already know how much time you'd like to reserve per month, that's great; but if you don't we'll happily discuss it with you to help you decide.

  1. When receiving your request, we'll first make sure we have enough time available. We may have a waitlist to make sure we can consistently provide excellent support to all current and new clients.
  2. We'll discuss your requirements and make sure all noses are pointing in the same direction.  
  3. We'll draft a support contract covering the legalese, and send this to you to sign digitally. Once the contract is signed, we'll send you an invoice for the first three months of the support contract. 
  4. Now you can start sending us all your questions! :-)

Please note that we require a 6-month minimum commitment for new support contracts. 

Yes.

First of all, note that the standard fair use policy allows you to exceed your reserved hours a little for those busy months. 

If you're consistently exceeding the reserved hours, it's worth upgrading to a higher plan. Simply send us an email asking us to increase the hours; that will go into effect the next month. We'll invoice you the extra time separately, or as part of your next quarterly bill. 

If you've overbooked and want to cut down on the number of reserved hours instead, you can request that in the same way via email. However, as you will have already prepaid for a certain number of hours for the 3 months period, a downgrade will only go into the effect at the start of the next 3-month billing period. 

In both cases we ask for at least a 2 week notice before the month/quarter is over. 

Yes. 

At this time, no. The 24-hour response time is a strong guideline, but we do not currently include a money-back guarantee/SLA in standard contracts.

On average we tend to our current clients' support needs in under 4-12 hours, which mostly depends on timezones and business hours. Times where we take longer to respond are typically focused around holidays or MODX events where we're physically separated from a laptop. 

No matter how busy things get in the modmore office, we always triage tickets as soon as they come in, and prioritise anything that sounds urgent. 

If you have a question that requires us to do more research before we can give you a useful answer, we'll tell you and give you an update on when to expect more. 

Do you really require a formal response time guarantee? We're happy to discuss a custom support contract with SLA, starting at €135/hr.

Not right now. 

Due to the nature of most of our support work, email is typically the better medium. We can include code samples, links to more resources, or spot typos in syntax that a phone call would not accommodate well. 

Having to pick up the phone is also a costly distraction for a small team that may also be simultaneously working on, for example, cool new features for Commerce. By triaging emails for urgency as they come in, we can better maintain the balance between development and support requirements during the day, which allows us to keep the cost for support low.

Rest assured, if a phone call is the best medium for a certain question, we're happy to call you back. 

Thanks to a decade of MODX experience and our various roles in the community, we have a wide range of knowledge when it comes to MODX, but there will definitely be extras we haven't used or server configurations we're not used to. 

In those cases, we'll typically give you the choice. Either we take a little more time to research it further and find the answer to your question, or we simply accept it's not something we can help you with right now. In the latter case, the time we may have already spent of course does not count against your reserved hours.

Impossible to say, as each question we get is different. 

For standard questions, about using common extras or core features, we can typically answer right away without having to do additional research into the specific topic. Depending on the complexity of the question and how much detail you'd like in our responses, we can typically fit 2-4 of those in an hour.

For other questions it may take us a little longer. Perhaps we need to research the extra a little first, login to the site in question to do some debugging, or examine code in detail before we can get back to you.  

Yes, we keep a simple spreadsheet up-to-date for you in Google Drive, which lists the date, (internal) ticket number, and the time spent answering your question. We'll happily provide you read access to that, so you know exactly how much time is left in your current billing period. 

Our first and foremost priority is providing you with excellent support. How long that takes is secondary, so typically we don't check or update your timesheet until after we've finished answering your questions. That might push us over your reserved time if that was already close.

If you want to avoid exceeding your time at all costs (pun intended), let us know and we'll instead check your remaining time before we get to work. 

Unless you have a custom contract with SLA, support for modmore-built premium extras falls under standard support included with the license. 

Open source extras do not normally come with support, so questions about those do take up time in your Premium Support contract. 

Also note that modmore also sells and distributes several premium extras built by third parties, such as Formalicious (built by Sterc) or Agenda (built by Treehill Studio). In those cases, the standard support is provided to you by someone else. If you specifically request that modmore handles questions about third party built extras, that does count towards your premium support.

In most cases your questions will indeed be answered by Mark Hamstra, MODX core integrator, long-time MODX nerd, and wearer of many hats at modmore.

However, that does not mean all support is guaranteed to be done by Mark exclusively. With premium support you're reserving time from the modmore team as a whole, not just Mark. 

We hope that Premium Support ends up being such a massive success with a somewhat predictable level of revenue and questions, that we'll hire extra people to help with the support, perhaps even in multiple regions worldwide. (If you think you'd be a great fit for such a support team, let Mark know.)

Premium Support is meant as a way to offer regular assistance to people building sites in MODX, with flexible billing and fair usage. By pitching it as a subscription, we get the benefit of knowing (roughly) how much support to expect and being able of scaling up our services and ensuring availability based on that. 

Clients benefit from that by knowing we have their back when they need it most, with a standard response time. 

For one-off questions without a subscriptions, we cannot promise availability or a certain response time. 

If we do have availability, we're happy to help you for a one-off Premium Support request at the overage rage of €125/hr (instead of €100 for reserved hours in a subscription), with a 30-minute minimum per case. 

To request help, send us an email. In the subject, mention Premium Support, and proactively state that you agree to the €125/hr rate in the content so we don't have to go back and forth on the terms first. Optionally include a cap on the time you want us to spend (otherwise we'll assume one hour), keep in mind the per-case minimum is 30 minutes. 

We may require (partial) pre-payment if this is your first or a large Premium Support request, so make sure your billing address is on file. Otherwise we'll typically invoice when the problem is resolved or the question is answered. Payment is due within 14 days.

At this time we don't offer prepaid blocks of Premium Support; if you'd like to make use of our support services regularly, that's precisely what the subscription is for. 

Got a question we've missed?

Email us

Here's what some of our clients had to say

Recommendation

We rebuilt our website in MODX a few years ago and it all seemed pretty straightforward. But then performance issues arose; the pages would take far too long to load and we had a hard time figuring out how to better this. Then Mark helped us with his expertise and left us with an understanding of what to look for and how to solve it.

So when we wanted a support agreement to help our development and maintenance, we contacted Mark.

We have worked with him for a while now and he has helped us a lot. We rely on him to keep our system updated and secure. Mark is knowledgeable, ease to communicate with and provides pleasant and reliable support.

Ingeborg Ragas

Stichting Zen.nl

Recommendation

A colleague of mine needed a hand in a messy MODX backend situation, and Mark answered my call for help in this area. He was like the angel that lifted us out of the storm! He was prompt, extremely knowledgeable, quick, and above all easy to work with. In the span of an hour, Mark helped us iron out kinks that we'd been fussing over for days. If you need a hand with MODX, I recommend Mark completely without reservation.

Mathias Dannevang

Dannevang ApS

Recommendation

Mark has consulted on a few web development projects for me recently in both emergency and non-critical support roles and is always a pleasure to deal with. His knowledge (particularly in MODX) and patience is staggering and I couldn't recommend his services any more highly.

James Seddon

Cotton

Recommendation

Mark is very easy to talk to and work with, very responsive in messaging and emailing when there is a potential issue; or just trying to troubleshoot and bounce ideas off of each other. Highly recommend for MODX and MODX based applications, highly skilled!!

Rachel Schimelman

RS Design

Signup for Premium Support or request more information

If you'd like to sign up for Premium Support, email Mark at [email protected].

We're more than happy to answer any questions you may have. We can also provide an example contract with the nitty-gritty legal text - even if you're not ready to commit yet.

Please note: As a small team, we may keep a first-come, first-served waiting list for new requests for Premium Support in periods of high demand. That way we can make sure we can consistently meet expectations for current and new clients.

Once we've discussed your needs and how we can best help, we'll prepare the support contract to sign digitally and issue the invoice for the first 3 months. Upon payment, your Premium Support coverage begins and we'll start answering all of your questions! :-)

Interested in Premium MODX Support?

Send us an email for more information