One of the most common questions I get asked, often slightly nervously, is some version of: what should we be paying for IT? It is a fair question and it deserves a straight answer, so let me give you one. I am not going to pretend there is a single magic number, because there is not, but I can tell you exactly how good IT is priced, what should be inside that price, and how to compare two quotes without getting fooled. That last part matters more than the number itself.
Let me start with the thing that makes everyone uneasy: the spread. Get three quotes for managed IT and you can easily see one that is half the price of another. That spread is not random, and it is not a negotiation game. It almost always means the three providers are quoting for genuinely different things. The cheap one is usually cheap because it is doing less, and the trick is learning to see what is missing.
Why good providers price per user, per month
The model you want to look for is a simple one: a fixed price per user, per month, that covers your IT support and the core tools that keep a person safe and working. There is a reason the good providers have settled on this, and it is not laziness. It lines up the incentives properly.
When you pay a flat monthly fee per person, your IT company makes more money by keeping your systems running smoothly and your team out of trouble, because every problem they prevent is one they do not have to fix for free. Compare that to paying by the hour, where, if you are honest about it, the provider quietly benefits when things break. Per user per month puts you and your IT company on the same side of the table. That alignment is worth more than almost any feature on the list.
It is also the only model that scales with your business in a way you can predict. You hire someone, you add a seat. Someone leaves, you remove one. No surprises, no renegotiation, just a number that moves sensibly with your headcount. That is how our own managed IT is priced, and you can see the actual figures on our pricing page, because I think hiding price behind a sales call is a small act of disrespect.
What should be in the number, and what should not
Here is where the cheap quotes start to give themselves away. A monthly per-user price should, at a minimum, cover your day-to-day support, the management and monitoring of your machines, your core security protection, and your backup. Those are not extras. They are the floor. A business is not actually being looked after if its data is not backed up and its devices are not protected, no matter how friendly the helpdesk is.
So when you read a quote, look for what has been quietly left out. Is security in the number, or is it a line item you discover later? Is backup included, or assumed to be your problem? Is there a real security baseline behind the support, or just someone to ring when something goes wrong? The cheapest quotes are often cheapest precisely because the things that matter most have been moved outside the price, where you will meet them again at the worst possible moment.
Some things genuinely should sit outside the monthly fee, and that is fine, as long as it is honest. New hardware, big projects, software licences for specialist applications: these are real, separate costs and any good provider will be upfront about them. The problem is never that extras exist. The problem is extras that were hidden to make the headline number look smaller than the real one.
Why the cheapest quote is usually the most expensive
This is the part I most want you to hold on to. In more than twenty years of doing this, I have watched the same story play out over and over. A business takes the cheapest option to save a little each month, and then pays for it many times over in the year that follows: in downtime when something that should have been prevented brings work to a halt, in a security incident that a proper baseline would have stopped, in the data they cannot get back because the backup nobody included was never really there.
The monthly saving is real and it is visible. The cost of what was left out is real too, but it is invisible until the day it is not, and by then it dwarfs everything you saved. Cheap IT is not cheap. It is expensive on a delay. The genuinely good-value provider is rarely the cheapest line on the page, but they are almost always the cheapest over a couple of years, because the things that go wrong with them are the things that never happen.
Cheap IT is not cheap. It is expensive on a delay. The saving is visible every month, and the cost of what was left out arrives all at once.
How to compare like for like
If you take one practical thing from this, take this. When you are weighing up quotes, do not compare the prices, compare what is inside them. Put them side by side and ask the same questions of each: is support included, and how fast do they respond? Is security in the price? Is backup in the price? What sits outside the monthly fee, and roughly what does it cost? Who actually does the work, and how many of them are there?
Once you normalise the quotes that way, the real differences appear, and the suspiciously cheap option usually turns out to be cheap for a reason you can now name. That is the whole game: not finding the lowest number, but making sure you are comparing the same thing before you choose. If you want a frank, no-obligation conversation about where your current spend is going and whether it is buying you what it should, that is exactly the kind of thing we are happy to do.
The simple version: good IT is priced per user per month, with support, security and backup inside the number, not bolted on later. Compare what is included, not the headline figure, and remember that the cheapest quote is almost always the one that costs the most in the end.
