What does managed IT actually cost? (2026)

What managed IT really costs in 2026

I’m going to teach you today What does managed IT actually cost and how does it how does the numbers move? How much does Company charge and why? We’re going to give you MSP pricing We’re going to give you the inside scoop into what your MSP is doing to get to the numbers So that you can make a good decision on whether or not you’re getting value or if you’re shopping What system works best for you? Every MSP today is charging in this range most small businesses pay somewhere between $100 and $250 per user per month and

I’m going to tell you how to move that down up or down in that range so that you can get the best deal for what you’re paying for. So let’s go through what MSPs do. There’s basically four ways an MSP charges for services.

The four ways MSPs charge (per-user, per-device, break-fix)

There’s per user pricing like I said before, between $100 and $250, and that’s per user per month. Then there’s per device pricing, which is between $30 and $100, and that’s per workstation or server. And some MSPs charge differently for servers. So that a server might, because of the additional cost and the additional overhead, between $100 and $400 per server. And they’ll tear it on up for service levels inside of that range.

And then there’s break fix. And break fix is between $125 and $250 per hour.

What moves the price up or down

So what moves the price? Well, one of the most important things that happens in your business from your MSP is your security stack.

The security stack, compliance & response time guarantees

That’s your endpoint detection. It’s your backup and is it being tested? That’s your security training. What kind of compliance needs do you use? What kind of compliance needs do you have? What services do you use to verify that? Are you a server based or are you cloud only?

There’s a lot of cost differences between the two. Servers have more CAPEX, clouds has more OPEX, one actually at the end of the day can cost more than the other depending on what you’re doing. Response time guarantees, this is a huge driver of cost. How quickly do they respond? How quickly do they expect to get the problem solved? In other words, do they have a season staff that can solve it quickly or do they have a greener staff that takes more time?

And then how quickly do you get to that staff? Are you sitting there waiting for them to respond? Is it 15 minutes? Is it 30 minutes? Is it two hours? Is it the next day? And then how much are they on site?

If they’re on site all the time, you’re going to pay more money. It costs more to have technicians come on site. You have to figure out which of these things is the most important. which thing drives your business productivity so that you can get stuff done and invest the money into the right service. So if speed is important, that’s going to be where you’re going to want to have a service level agreement that produces speed. Maybe security is less important. Maybe you’re a company that that fixes cars and nobody’s you’re not concerned about hackers.

There’s no because there’s no compliance needs there. Well, let’s talk about speed. If my people aren’t able to do their work, I’m not making any money. Or maybe you have high security needs. Maybe you are doing work and have compliance needs. Then you better make sure that you have the security stack.

You can’t have all of it for nothing. So that’s going to be where you’re going to have to spend the money on the services that get you the right results.

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

Let’s talk about what cheap can get you. And often break fix where there’s zero maintenance being done where you’re just paying hourly for for things when it breaks. You can save a lot of money, but it can also be the most dangerous. A one-time prospect now customer one at one point was using break fix. They had a great IT company prior to working with us, but they didn’t pay for them to manage it.

They didn’t pay for security. They did most of the work themselves and they only paid when they needed support. This resulted in them being one minute, one drive away, one plugging one piece of equipment into another piece of equipment from losing all their data, and basically being out of business. And it was over 25 years of data that they would have lost. So that’s worth being cheap, doing it yourself, not knowing how to manage it can be really expensive, like the whole business expensive.

Red flags in an IT quote

So Red Flag might be, when you’re looking over who you’re going to work with, no contractual response time. They’re not guaranteeing a response time. They’re saying nothing in their agreement about when you can expect to get service. An IT company that doesn’t have that information in the agreement is at some point going to not fulfill what you expect from them. I hear horror stories constantly, companies that respond within a day or two or three or maybe even a week if they feel like it’s a low enough, not important enough issue.

Another thing you should look at is, is security an add-on? So break fix might just say, well, we’ll do your work for you, but you don’t have to have our security platform. That’s not good. They’re basically setting you up to fail and at some point you’re going to be paying them that $125 to $250 an hour to fix all the problems that come from not having proper security.

How projects should be priced (no surprises)

Projects, so no managed agreement should include all the projects because projects come and go as time goes by, as needs change, as things break, as technology changes. And the projects should have very clear definitions and very clear costs and deliverables. And you should never be surprised by a project. If you have an old server that needs to be replaced, they should let you know that. So that when that server gets, either you place it early so you don’t have downtime.

Right now early is not the right word. You replace it on schedule so you eliminate the downtime from a server failure. Or you can expect it to fail and project fees, you know, we’ll show that because it’s going to go from being a Scheduled ready to go easy project to it last minute, you know nightmare project So the project fees how they handle projects you got to make sure that that’s well defined so What would a 10-person company likely pay?

What a 10-person company actually pays

so a 10-person company in the Per user is Well, $100 to $250 times each person, so that’s between $1,000 and $2,500 or $2,500 per month. A 10-user company could have 50 computers though, so a manufacturer is a great example of that. You might have a 1-to-1 computer ratio in the back office and then a 1-to-10 computer ratio back on the shop floor. And so we like to price the manufacturing, which is what we’re really good at in that per device range But so if you have 50 devices, that’s 50 times 100. It’s 5,000 or it might be 50 times 30 You do the math So a 10 user network can be really, you know, any of course from well 50 times 30 is a hot Let’s see if it’s 15 or 1500 bucks

all the way up to that, you know, $5,000 range. So, a 10-user network, it can get, and then there’s how much data you’re backing up, what security needs, things like that, all that goes into it. And that’s where that range comes from, that 30 to 100. If you have low security, you’re going to be closer to the $30 per device, or $100 per user. If you have high security needs, you’re going to be in that $250 per user range.

Why two quotes for the same company differ so much

Why do two quotes for the same company differ so much? Well, now you know why, because what is the security they’re promising? What is the service level they’re promising? How much data are they going to actually back up? How quickly are they going to respond?

How quickly are they going to solve the problems? How seasoned is their staff? And if you want it done quick, you want it done right, that’s going to cost a little more. And every company is different, so that price range fluctuates wildly and it’s it’s going to be up to you to determine well speed is less important than security so I can go with this company or a security’s prime paramount so I can go with that company being fully aware fully aware that to have all of it it’s going to cost you way more than just having one or two of those features.

Is IT managed? Is managed IT cheaper than hiring an IT guy?

Managed IT vs. hiring your own IT person

always. Because if you have an IT guy, if you have one person managing it, you should always have another company available for when he’s sick, when he gets injured, when he wins the Lotto for when he or she, when they have something they don’t know, that’s the big thing. They can’t know everything is impossible. I have a half a dozen people that that know stuff it would be impossible for any one person to know everything. I know a lot. My lead engineer knows a lot and the two of us know way more than any one IT guy could ever know.

So is a managed IT cheaper than hiring an IT guy? Yeah because you get all of us and the redundancy for typically less than the price of an IT guy. We talk about that in the next video about how expensive an IT guy is. You’re looking at $60,000 to $160,000 per year for an IT guy, and that buys a whole lot of managed IT services.

How ACS does it

If you’re interested in learning more about how we do it, we fancy ourselves as being one of the faster IT companies. We try to get to you quickly. We have a solid security bundle that, yeah, it gets the job done for all the way, the very secure companies, all the way down to having the ability to scale it back so that it will fit with the smaller companies and be price affordable so they can protect themselves enough. It very much is flexible. We have layers on top of layers that we that we can do and yeah and then

you know we’ve got a deep bench of really knowledgeable people and you can see what our price goes versus the other guys and we would love to show you and talk to that with you. So I hope you learned about how MSPs work about how our pricing works and about how well why you could get such a variable range and what we can do for you and yeah that’s it hope everybody has a great day appreciate your time