Most small businesses pay between $100 and $250 per user, per month for managed IT. In this video I break down exactly how MSPs get to their numbers — so you can tell whether you’re getting value, or figure out what setup fits you best if you’re shopping. The full written version is below.

The four ways MSPs charge

Every provider’s pricing boils down to a handful of models:

• Per-user pricing — one monthly fee per employee, covering their devices. This is the range most small businesses live in: $100–$250 per user, per month.
• Per-device pricing — $30–$100 per workstation monthly. Servers carry more overhead and cost, so they price separately at $100–$400 per server, tiered by service level.
• Break-fix — no plan, no maintenance; you pay $125–$250 per hour when something breaks. It looks cheap. Keep reading.

What moves the price up or down

The biggest driver is your security stack: endpoint detection, backup — and whether that backup is actually being tested — and security training for your people. Then your compliance needs, and what it takes to verify them.

Server-based or cloud-only matters too. Servers are capital expense, cloud is operating expense, and depending on what you’re doing, either one can end up costing more.

Then there’s the one people underestimate: response time guarantees. How fast does the provider respond — 15 minutes? Two hours? Next day? And how fast do they solve the problem once they respond? That second part is really a question about staff: a seasoned team fixes in minutes what takes a greener team hours. Speed costs money to staff — and it’s worth it the day your line is down.

Finally, onsite time. Technicians on site regularly costs more than remote-first support with onsite visits when hardware actually needs hands.

You can’t have all of it for nothing. If your people being down means you’re not making money, spend on the response guarantee. If you handle sensitive data or carry compliance obligations, spend on the security stack. Match the money to what actually drives your business.

What “cheap” can really cost you — a true story

A prospect of ours — now a customer — was on break-fix. Good IT company before us, but they didn’t pay for management, didn’t pay for security, did most things themselves, and only called when something broke.

They ended up one drive, one plugged-in piece of equipment away from losing 25 years of data. Not “lose a day of work” — out-of-business territory. That’s what cheap can cost: the-whole-business expensive.

We’ve also broken down what one hour offline costs a small business — for most companies it’s more than a month of managed service.

Red flags in an IT quote

• No contractual response time. If the agreement says nothing about when you can expect service, at some point they won’t deliver what you expect. I hear the horror stories constantly — responses in a day, two days, a week, whenever they decide your issue matters.
• Security as an add-on. A provider who’ll “do your work” without their security platform is setting you up to fail — and setting themselves up to bill $125–$250 an hour fixing what proper security would have prevented.
• Vague project fees. Projects should have clear definitions, clear costs, clear deliverables — and you should never be surprised by one. If your server is aging out, a good provider schedules its replacement so it’s an easy, planned project instead of a last-minute nightmare after it fails.

The real math: what a 10-person company pays

On per-user pricing: 10 people × $100–$250 = $1,000–$2,500 per month.

But headcount isn’t always the right measure. A 10-person manufacturer might run 50 computers — one-to-one in the front office, one-to-ten out on the shop floor. That’s why we price manufacturing per device: 50 devices at $30–$100 each lands between $1,500 and $5,000 per month, driven by how much data you’re backing up and how much security you need. Low security needs put you near the bottom of the range; high needs put you near the top.

Why two quotes for the same company differ so much

Now you know: what security are they promising? What service level? How much data are they backing up? How fast do they respond — and how seasoned is the team doing the responding? Fast and right costs more. Every company weighs it differently, which is why the range swings so widely. Just be fully aware: having all of it costs more than picking the one or two things that matter most to your business.

Is managed IT cheaper than hiring an IT person?

Always — and here’s why. One person managing everything means you need a backup plan for when they’re sick, injured, on vacation, or hit the lottery. And no one person can know everything; it’s impossible. I know a lot. My lead engineer knows a lot. The two of us together know more than any one IT hire ever could — and there are half a dozen of us. An IT hire runs $60,000–$160,000 a year, and that buys a whole lot of managed IT service with a full team and redundancy behind it.

If you have internal IT you want to keep, that’s what co-managed IT is for — your team keeps control, and we add the tooling, monitoring, and bench depth behind them. To be clear: co-managed isn’t a discount play — it’s a premium arrangement for businesses whose deep institutional knowledge is worth keeping in-house. The full in-house-vs-managed math — loaded costs, the single point of failure, and when hiring actually wins — is in Managed IT vs. Hiring Your Own IT Person.

Frequently asked questions

What would a 10-person company pay for managed IT?

On per-user pricing, a 10-person company lands between $1,000 and $2,500 per month depending on security and service level. If the business has far more devices than people — like a manufacturer with shared shop-floor machines — per-device pricing usually fits better, and a 50-device network typically runs between roughly $1,500 and $5,000 per month.

Why do two quotes for the same company differ so much?

Because the service inside them differs: what security is included, what response time is guaranteed, how much data gets backed up, and how seasoned the staff solving your problems is. Normalize what’s actually included before comparing the numbers.

Is managed IT cheaper than hiring an IT person?

For most small businesses, yes. One IT hire costs $60,000–$160,000 a year, can’t know everything, and isn’t available around the clock. A managed provider gives you a whole team with redundancy — typically for less than the cost of that one salary.

What are the red flags in a cheap IT quote?

No contractual response time, security sold as an optional add-on, and vaguely defined project fees. Cheap plans usually recover their margin somewhere — often at $125–$250 an hour fixing the problems the plan didn’t prevent.

Get a real number for your business

Ranges are ranges — your environment has an actual number. We fancy ourselves one of the faster IT companies, with a security bundle that scales from very secure down to affordable-but-protected, and a deep bench of people who know their stuff. We serve Chicagoland, Traverse City & Northern Michigan, and Winter Haven & Central Florida. Book a discovery call — we’d love to show you how our pricing stacks up against the other guys.