Nobody can quote managed IT accurately from a headcount alone, and a provider who does is either guessing or leaving themselves room to true it up later. Six things move the number more than anything else.
- People and devices. How many staff, how many machines each, and whether they are shared. A 30-person business where everyone has a laptop and a phone costs more to run than a 30-person business with 18 shared terminals.
- Servers and where they live. On-premise servers carry hardware, patching and failure risk that cloud workloads do not. A single legacy server pinned to an old operating system often costs more to support than the rest of the fleet combined.
- Sites and travel. One office is straightforward. Multiple branches, or sites outside a main centre, change both response times and the cost of getting an engineer there.
- Licensing mix. Which Microsoft 365 plans you need is a real cost, and it is genuinely separate from the service fee. Be wary of any quote that blurs the two.
- Security tier. Baseline endpoint protection is not the same product as monitored detection and response. Where you land on cyber security is usually the single biggest swing factor after headcount.
- Compliance and after-hours. If you carry compliance obligations, or need genuine out-of-hours cover rather than best-effort, both need to be priced in rather than assumed.
This is why our managed IT plans are scoped rather than published as a single per-seat rate. The published examples above are the parts that genuinely are the same for everyone.
How to compare two managed IT quotes
Most quotes are not comparable as written, because the cheaper one has usually moved things out of the fee rather than out of the work. Before you compare the monthly number, check each quote answers all seven of these:
- Is it priced per user or per device, and which is cheaper given how your team actually works?
- Are Microsoft or other licences included, or billed on top?
- Is security in the fee, and at what tier? Antivirus and managed detection are different products at different prices.
- Is backup included, and is a restore ever actually tested? See backup and recovery.
- What happens after hours, and does it cost extra?
- Is support unlimited, or a block of hours that runs out in a bad month?
- Are projects separate? Most are, and that is reasonable, but it should be stated. See projects and consulting.
A quote that is cheaper on every one of those is not cheaper, it is smaller. If you want a second opinion on one you have already received, our IT advisory team will read it with you, and the managed IT versus in-house comparison covers the case where hiring is genuinely the better answer.
