TestingBudget

Hard Costs

Professional services rate

What the vendor’s services team charges per hour for the share of the work you buy from them instead of staffing it.

Also called: services rate · consulting rate · implementation day rate

Unit
money per hour
Where you enter it
Hard Costs tab, per vendor — once for the whole workspace.

What it means

The hourly rate on the vendor’s professional-services quote: the consultants, implementation engineers or managed-service testers who do part of the build, run or maintenance work for you. It is entered once per vendor and applied to every hour the professional services share hands to the services team, in every application that vendor is a column of. A day rate divides by the hours in the vendor’s day.

Hours priced at this rate are an invoice, not payroll. They do not consume your FTE budget, so they do not count towards build duration or FTE demand.

Why it matters to the cost

A services engagement changes where the money goes, not how much work there is. The same 300 build hours cost your team’s rate when you staff them and the services rate when you buy them, and the two rates are rarely equal: a specialist team may cost more per hour and still finish sooner, or an offshore team may cost less. Modelling the split shows the true cash cost of a quote that bundles onboarding hours, and keeps the build duration honest when most of the hours are not yours.

Typical values

Quoted per hour or per day; often well above a loaded internal rate for specialist implementation, below it for offshore managed testing. Enter the figure on the quote.

Typical values describe a category of tool — AI-native, codeless, script-based, homegrown, manual — never a named product. Why we do not price named products.

Where it appears in the model

Hours you buy from the vendor instead of staffing

services hours
a phase’s effort × Work done by professional services for that phase
Labour cost
(effort − services hours) × Effective hourly rate — only your own team’s hours
Professional services cost
services hours × Professional services rate + Professional services package — the package lands once, in year 1
Build duration
Σ your team’s Build effort ÷ FTE capacity — services hours are invoiced, not staffed

Every name is a link to its definition. See the whole model.

Try it with your numbers

Professional services rate is a row in the calculator. Change it and every total on the page moves with it — free, in your browser, nothing to install.

See how professional services rate impacts the calculation of test automation costs

Related terms

  • Work done by professional services The percentage of a phase’s hours — build, run or maintenance — the vendor’s services team does instead of your own people.
  • Professional services package A one-time services fee quoted as a package rather than as hours — onboarding, implementation, a fixed-price pilot.
  • Effective hourly rate The loaded cost of an engineer per year divided by their productive hours — the rate every hour of effort is priced at.
  • Labour cost Hours of effort multiplied by the effective hourly rate — how every effort figure in the model becomes money.

Last reviewed 2026-09-16. All terms.