Kitware offers several levels of support and consulting services. The correct option for you will depend on several factors including the type of assistance you require (from answering occasional questions your developers may have through developing your project for you) and the size of your project / development team. The three basic forms of support and consulting contract are outlined below.

Standard Support: This $5,000 USD support option is targeted at individuals and small groups who use Kitware's open source products in their development. Standard Support provides you with an initial 25 hours of custom consulting that can be used by you and your team to ask questions, have bugs resolved, and have small prototypes developed. Additional hours of support may be purchased for $195 per hour (with a minimum purchase of 10 hours), and Standard Support customers may purchase sets of Kitware books at a discount price.

Elite Support: If you have a large team, or require extensive custom development then you may want to consider the Elite Support option. With a minimum commitment of $25,000 USD you will obtain our preferred dual tier rates of $110 per hour for staff, and $195 for senior staff. Your consulting time may be used for support questions, bug fixes, custom development of classes or applications, or project testing and maintenance efforts.

Custom Consulting: If you have a well-defined project that is over $50,000 USD (approximately 10 weeks of effort), then Kitware can provide you with a fixed-cost contract to develop customized modules, libraries, or applications to your specifications. Smaller projects, or projects that are not well-specified and may evolve over time would instead use the Elite Support option. Kitware has worked with many small and large businesses, research institutions, and government agencies to create customized solutions, with project efforts ranging from a few person-months to over ten person-years.

Standard Support is targeted at individuals and small groups that use or are considering using Kitware's open source products as part of their development. A Standard Support contract provides you with an initial 25 hours of custom consulting that can be used by your and your team to ask questions, have bugs resolved, and have small prototypes developed. In addition, Standard Support customers receive the following benefits:

• A subscription to Kitware's quarterly developer newsletter
• The option to purchase a complete set of Kitware books (5 titles)
  • $325 for US customers, or
  • $425 for international customers
• The option to purchase additional support hours. The current rate for additional standard support hours is $195 per hour with a minimum purchase of 10 additional hours.

Elite Support is intended to provide support for large development teams, or to provide extensive customized development of classes, prototypes or applications. With a minimum commitment of $25,000 USD you will obtain our preferred dual tier rates of $110 per hour for staff, and $195 for senior staff. Your consulting time may be used for support questions, bug fixes, custom development of classes or applications, or project testing and maintenance efforts. In addition, Elite Support customers receive the following benefits:

• A subscription to Kitware's quarterly developer newsletter
• The option to purchase a complete set of Kitware books (5 titles)
  • $325 for US customers, or
  • $425 for international customers
• Monthly reports of support services used / remaining support balance.
• Monthly billing once the initial $25,000 fee is exhausted.

Kitware has extensive expertise in visualization, medical image processing, parallel / large data processing, computer vision, and high-quality cross-platform software development. We have completed many customized development projects ranging from small several month efforts through large multi-year, multi-million dollar effort. These include:

• Creating customized versions of VolView for radiation treatment, dental implant planning, and pharmaceuticals trials.
• Developing new open source communities such as ITK and ParaView
• Creating customized proprietary toolkits, prototypes, and end-user applications on top of our open source products for large corporations in diverse areas such as medical imaging, pharmaceutical research, oil and gas exploration, simulation, geo-physical research, and publications.

If your project is well-defined and larger than $50,000 (approximately 10 to 12 weeks of effort), then Kitware can provide you with a fixed-price contract. Please send your project information or any questions you may have to kitware@kitware.com or call us at (518) 371-3971 between the hours of 8:00am and 4:00pm EST.