Support and Maintenance: What's Reasonable

Ask a room what AMC should be and someone will say 10 percent, as per GFR. Ask them for the rule. The General Financial Rules tell you to provide for maintenance, to buy with warranty in mind, to avoid irregular extensions, and to be economical. They do not enact a universal 10 percent of hardware as the lawful price of caring for a model. That number is folklore that became a negotiation opening.

This study treats AMC as a commercial annex with a scope, a response clock, an exclusion list and a rupee. Percentages are a shorthand for that rupee against a defined base. The shorthand is useful. The folklore is not. We will describe the band we see in government IT practice — often high-single-digit to mid-teens of a defined hardware value per year after warranty, sometimes a flat rupee for software support — and we will refuse to call the band a statute.

AI makes the folklore worse, because the asset is a mix of cards, a runtime, a prompt, and an SI who knows where the bodies are. Score the annex, not the percentage.

What you are buying when you say AMC

Hardware AMC: parts, labour, next-business-day or four-hour, on-site or depot, disks returned or destroyed, firmware. This is the old object. GPUs add liquid-cooling kits, NVLink bridges, and OEM blessing for used parts. Read those lines.

Software support: runtime bugs, security builds, compatibility with a named OS, a named CUDA or equivalent, a named model format. It is not we will make the model smarter every quarter unless you pay for that as a separate improvement bag. Ops retainer: the people who bag, rebuild, and sit on the change window. In an air-gap this is the real AMC. A cheap hardware percentage with no ops retainer is how the gap becomes a museum.

Improvement: new workflows, new evals, prompt changes when circulars change. If this is inside AMC, AMC will be expensive. If it is outside, AMC will look cheap and the change-request file will grow. Pick one and write it.

Score the annex. The percentage is the last column.

Question	Reasonable	Unreasonable
Base of the percent	Named hardware value, dated, excluding one-time SI	A percent of a platform TCO the vendor invented
Hours / days	Indian working hours plus a named severity-1 clock	Follow-the-sun with no roster
CVE / rebuild	A window and a bag path, extra for emergency	Silent; or unlimited free rebuilds that will not happen
Exclusions	Listed: new workflows, new languages, MIS changes	Hidden; everything is extra, or everything is included and nothing is staffed
Exit	Knowledge transfer and a last export are in scope	Support dies on non-renewal day zero with no bag

The band, not the law

For conventional government servers and networking, annual comprehensive AMC after warranty has long clustered, in practice we see on files, around the high single digits to about 15 percent of a defined value, with OEM gold-care and four-hour SLAs running higher, and with depot-only parts-only running lower. That is an observation about quotes, not a dataset we will pretend is a national survey, and not GFR.

For software support, percentages of licence are a different animal. Some products sell 18–22 percent as if it were physics. It is not. It is a commercial habit. Explode it into hours and builds. A flat rupee for a named roster can be cheaper and clearer. For AI runtimes, expect the annex to cost more than a ping-the-server AMC if you want eval-on-rebuild and an air-gap bag. A hardware-only 8 percent that excludes the runtime is not a bargain. It is a half-purchase.

Multi-year AMC bought with the hardware can be economical if the discount is real and the scope is frozen. It can also be a prepaid trap if you might stop in year two. Read the kill article before you prepay three years to chase a 1-point discount.

How to negotiate without folklore

Ask for a rupee and a percent on a defined base. Compare rupees. The percent is a headline for people who will not read the base. Move scope, not superstition. If the quote is 18 percent and includes two new workflows a year, it may beat 9 percent that invoices every circular. Put the circular cadence in the room.

Separate OEM hardware care from the SI's brain. You can lose one and keep the other. Do not let them be bundled so that a GPU fan replacement requires a prompt engineer. Prcept will quote support as a roster and a rebuild path. We will show the percent against a base if you want one. We will not tell a committee that GFR demands 10.

Roster beats percentage

Ask for names or at least a named roster pattern: who picks up a severity-1 at 21:00 on a gazetted holiday, from which city, in which language. A 12 percent annex with nobody who can rebuild your GGUF is more expensive than an 16 percent annex with two people who already have your jump procedure.

If the roster is in another country, write the jurisdiction and the break-glass path. CERT-In-resident logs and a foreign rebuild session can coexist, but only if you designed the path. Silence is not design.

Objections you will hear — and what to do with them

These are the lines that stall the file. Answer them in the room, then put the answer in the note. A spoken answer without paper will be forgotten by the next officer.

GFR says 10 percent

Show the rule that sets a standing 10 percent of AI hardware as the lawful AMC. We have not found it. Provide for maintenance, yes. A folklore number, no.

OEM list is 18 percent, so that is the market

OEM list is an opening. Scope, years, and whether you already have SDC hands decide the rupee.

We will take comprehensive everything so we never see a CR

Then staff it. An all-in AMC with two people in Bengaluru and your hall in a hill station is a poem.

AMC on open-weight software should be zero

The weights are free. The rebuild is not. Someone is on call. Pay them or hire them. Zero is a staffing decision, not a licence fact.

A one-week AMC autopsy

1. Day 1: split hardware care, runtime support, ops retainer, improvement bag.
2. Day 2: force a rupee, a base, a clock, and exclusions in writing.
3. Day 3: compare all-in year-two cash, not percents.
4. Day 4–5: decide prepay versus option. Align the kill clause with the failed-pilot note.

How this shows up in the file

Subject: Support and maintenance annex for [system].

No GFR percentage has been treated as mandatory. Hardware care, runtime, ops and improvement are priced separately in Annex A. Year-two all-in cash is [amount] against a defined base of [amount] ([x] percent, shorthand only). Exclusions: [list]. Kill / non-renewal: [clause]. Roster: [hours, location].

This study is not a CVC circular and not legal advice. AMC folklore is not a statutory rate.

This article is informational field guidance for Indian public institutions, not legal, procurement, tax, accounting, tariff or engineering advice. Confirm against the current Gazette, GFR, GeM term, SERC tariff order, IndiaAI portal rule, CAG mandate, DPDP text, departmental finance manual and your counsel before you file it. Figures are methods and order-of-magnitude illustrations, not a dataset of real deployments and not a substitute for a live quote.

How to put this in the finance note

A P2 Procurement searching “AMC percentage IT contract” needs a number a CFO can defend, not a GPU brand. “Support and Maintenance: What's Reasonable” belongs in a cost model with people, power, idle time, AMC and the cost of a failed pilot.

There is no honest sentence that says GFR fixes AI AMC at 8 or 10 or 15 percent. There is a market band, a scope problem, and a way to score the annex. IndiaAI subsidy, if you use it, is a live notice — not a permanent discount. On-prem TCO includes ops headcount. Do not invent Rs/hour. Cite the source of every rupee.

• Separate capex, opex, and one-time cleanup.
• Show utilisation, not just peak GPUs.
• Price the human fallback, not only inference.
• Date every tariff and subsidy assumption.

Close this loop before the next CAB

Put “Support and Maintenance: What's Reasonable” on the next change-advisory or bid-opening agenda as a single line item with an owner. If it cannot earn a line item, it will not earn a control. The owner should be a P2 Procurement, not “the vendor.”

Revisit the item when the model, the GeM term, the region, or the SI changes. “AMC percentage IT contract” is not a one-time workshop. It is a watch item. Date the last check. Unsigned watch items are souvenirs.