Managed IT pricing is not a mystery, but plenty of providers act like it is. Here are the models, the real ranges, what's included, and the sales moves that should slow you down. We publish this because pricing opacity mostly benefits the seller.
The three pricing models
- Per-user. The most common. You pay for each employee, and their devices ride along. Typical range: $100 to $200 per user per month for full coverage. A 20-person office lands at $2,000 to $4,000 monthly.
- Per-device. You pay for each managed machine: workstations maybe $30 to $60, servers $100 to $400. Fits businesses where devices outnumber people (shops, clinics, warehouses) or the reverse.
- Flat monthly. One negotiated number for the whole environment. Simple, predictable, and worth revisiting yearly so it tracks your actual size.
Why the wide ranges: market, on-site expectations, compliance needs (HIPAA raises the floor), server count, and how much security is bundled versus sold separately.
What full coverage should include
Help desk, remote monitoring, patching, backup management with actual restore testing, endpoint protection, email security, and vendor wrangling. If any of those are add-ons, price the package with them added before comparing quotes.
What legitimately costs extra
Projects (migrations, office moves, new server builds), hardware, software licenses passed through, and after-hours emergencies on some plans. None of that is a red flag. A quote that buries routine monitoring or backup testing in the "extra" column is.
Sales tactics that should slow you down
We compete against these pitches, so judge our motives accordingly. But watch for:
- Fear pricing. A quote justified mostly by breach horror stories. Fear is a discount on scrutiny. Real risk gets sized with numbers, like your own downtime math, not with headlines.
- The expiring discount. "This price is good until Friday." Managed IT is a years-long relationship. Any provider who needs you to skip diligence is telling you what their renewals look like.
- Three-year terms with auto-renewal. Long terms benefit the seller. One year is normal; month-to-month after year one is better. Check the renewal notice window before signing, not after.
- Per-user pricing that quietly excludes servers. The headline number looks great until the environment audit adds them back. Get the all-in monthly figure in writing.
- No offboarding terms. If the contract is silent on how you get your passwords and documentation back when you leave, that silence is the answer. See switching providers for what to demand.
How to compare quotes
Normalize to one number: total monthly cost for your real head count and device list with security, backup, and after-hours coverage included. Then compare that against the in-house math and against what downtime costs you. Cheapest is not the goal. Cheapest almost always shows up later as the outage that made someone switch to us.
Want this handled instead of homeworked? That's the job.
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