What managed IT costs, and what should be included

Managed IT for a business of 10 to 250 people is most often priced per user, per month. Ours is published: from $125, $175 or $235 per user, with a $750 monthly minimum, month to month. What matters as much as the number is what’s inside it.

How managed IT is priced

Most managed IT providers price one of three ways. Per user covers everything a person uses: laptop, phone, email, the lot. Per device counts machines instead, which gets complicated when one person has three. Hourly or block hours charges for time, which means the provider earns more when things break.

A flat per-user price is the easiest to budget and the only one where the provider’s incentive matches yours: the fewer problems you have, the better the arrangement works for both of you.

What every plan should include

Whatever the name on the plan, these are the parts that make it managed rather than a phone number:

• Monitoring and alerting on every device, around the clock, so a failing disk is flagged before it fails.
• Patching of the operating system and third-party software, inside published windows.
• Remote support without a meter running, so people ask for help early.
• Backup that has been restored from, on a schedule, with a record of each test.
• A security baseline: multi-factor authentication on email at the very least, and endpoint protection on every device.
• Documentation in your name: accounts, passwords, the network and the vendors.
• A report, every month, that says what was done and what wasn’t.

If a quote doesn’t say which of these it includes, ask. If the answer is “it depends”, that’s the answer.

What’s usually extra, and how to read it

Hardware and software licenses are almost always billed separately, and they should be: they’re yours. What matters is that the margin on them is stated. Projects, such as a new network or a migration, are usually quoted separately. On-site visits and after-hours work vary the most between providers, so read those lines carefully.

Our prices, with the arithmetic

Ours are published: Essential from $125, Secured from $175 and Complete from $235 per user per month, with a $750 monthly minimum and no minimum company size. Month to month; about 10% less with a twelve-month commitment.

Those are floors. The real number comes from a 20-minute review of what you run, and it holds after you sign. What each plan includes, line by line.

Questions to ask any quote, including ours

1. What’s the response time for a critical issue, and is it in the agreement?
2. When did you last restore one of my backups, and can I see the record?
3. Is multi-factor authentication required, or optional?
4. What’s billed outside the monthly fee?
5. How long is the term, and what does it cost to leave?
6. Who owns the passwords and the documentation if we part ways?

What it replaces

Twelve people on Secured cost $25,200 a year. The U.S. national median salary for one network and computer systems administrator was $99,130 in May 2025, before benefits (Bureau of Labor Statistics). That’s not the whole comparison, since one person and a managed plan do different jobs, but it’s the arithmetic most owners ask for first. Run it with your local salary.