Break-fix means you call when something breaks and pay by the hour. Managed means you pay a flat monthly fee and the provider keeps things from breaking. The difference sounds like billing. It's actually incentives, and incentives decide how your IT gets treated.
How break-fix works
You have a tech or a small shop you call when the server acts up. They bill $100 to $200 an hour, often with a minimum. No contract, no monthly fee. When nothing breaks, you pay nothing.
The catch is what nobody is doing between calls. Nobody is patching, nobody is checking that backups ran, nobody is watching the disk that's about to fail. Break-fix IT finds problems the same way you do: when they've already cost you a workday.
How managed works
A flat monthly fee covers monitoring, patching, help desk, and maintenance. The provider makes the same money whether you call once or fifty times, so their profit lives in preventing the fifty calls. Your quiet month and their good month are the same month. That alignment is the whole product.
The incentive problem, said plainly
A break-fix shop earns more when you have more problems. Most are honest people who don't milk it, but the structure rewards big cleanup projects over boring prevention, and structure wins over time. A managed provider earns more when you have fewer problems. Neither model makes anyone a saint. One just points the money at prevention.
What the outage math looks like
A 15-person company at break-fix rates might spend $3,000 in a bad year on hourly calls, against $30,000 or so for managed coverage. Cheaper, until the year includes a dead server with an untested backup. Two days of 15 people idle plus emergency recovery runs well past $20,000, and that's the mild version. We walk through that arithmetic in what an hour of downtime costs. Break-fix pricing looks good precisely because it excludes the expensive part.
When break-fix is honestly fine
- You're tiny. Five people or fewer on laptops with everything in Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. There isn't much to manage yet.
- Downtime is cheap for you. If email being down for a day is an annoyance instead of a payroll fire, prevention buys you less.
- No sensitive data. No card numbers, patient records, or client files that make a breach an existential event.
- Somebody techy on staff already handles the small stuff and just needs backup for the big stuff.
If that's you, keep a good hourly tech's number and don't let anyone scare you into a contract. Revisit when head count grows or the first real outage stings.
The middle option
Some providers offer monitoring-only plans: a small monthly fee for patching, backup checks, and alerts, with actual fixes billed hourly. It's a reasonable bridge for businesses that have outgrown pure break-fix but aren't ready for full management. Ask about it. Shops that only quote the full plan when a smaller one fits are telling you something about how the rest of the relationship will go.
Want this handled instead of homeworked? That's the job.
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