Managed IT services pricing: what it actually costs
The market runs $100 to $250 per user, per month. Ours sits under that, for a deliberately smaller service. Set the numbers below to your own office and unlock what it costs.
Chat support for the passwords, printers, and mailboxes that eat your week.
- No long-term contract
- No setup fee
- Flat monthly fee, unlimited tickets
- Every exclusion published below
Managed IT services typically cost $100 to $250 per user, per month in 2026, with $150 to $200 typical for a small business on a standard plan. Price moves with headcount, security and compliance scope, how much on-site time is included, and how old the equipment is. Remote-only plans with a narrower scope sit well below that band.
At a glance
- The market runs $100 to $250 per user, per month. $150 to $200 is typical for a small business.
- Most providers charge a one-time onboarding fee of $50 to $250 per user. We charge nothing to start.
- Compliance work, 24/7 cover and on-site engineers are the three things that move a quote most.
- We sit at the bottom of the market range because the scope is smaller: chat only, weekdays only, remote only.
- Every gap in that scope is listed on this page with a price against it. Nothing is held back for the sales call.
- No contract, no setup fee, cancel with 30 days notice. The calculator above prices your own office.
How MSPs price managed IT services
Six models, and which one a provider uses tells you more about their business than their brochure does. Ours is per user, because one person now runs three devices and charging per device punishes them for owning a tablet.
| Model | How it works | Typical range | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Per userOurs | One flat fee per employee, covering every device that person uses | $100 to $250 / user / mo | Teams where one person runs a laptop, a phone and a tablet |
| Per device | A flat fee per endpoint: each workstation, server and firewall | $75 to $200 / device / mo | Shift work and shared workstations, where devices outnumber people |
| Tiered bundles | Fixed packages at set service levels, with an upgrade path | $85 to $225 / user / mo | Buyers who want to start small and grow into more cover |
| Co-managed | The provider supplements an IT person you already employ | $55 to $110 / user / mo | 75 seats and up, with someone in-house already |
| Per service | Individual services billed separately, nothing bundled | Varies | A single specific need, like email security on its own |
| Break-fix hourly | Pay per incident, no monthly fee, no monitoring between calls | $125 to $200 / hour | Under five people with very little riding on the computers |
Our rate card
One flat rate per person, a monthly minimum, and a short add-on list. There is one plan rather than three tiers, and nothing on the card is a range.
Switch on every per-person add-on and you are still below the bottom of the market band. The gap is not efficiency. It is scope, and the next section is the scope we removed.
What is included, and what costs extra
The second list is the one worth reading. Being specific about the gaps before anyone asks is the entire argument for the price.
In the monthly fee
- Chat support, Monday to Friday, 9am to 6pm ET
- Remote screen control so we fix it while you watch
- Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace account help
- Unlimited tickets at one flat price per person
- First response the same business day
Billed separately, and why
Phone support, evenings and weekends
Staffing a queue outside 9 to 6 is the single largest cost in a managed plan, and most small offices never use it.
Anyone coming to your office
A truck roll costs more than a month of service. Booked per trip, at the rate on the card, rather than priced into every seat.
Servers and anything in a rack
Servers need patch windows, capacity monitoring and an out-of-hours alert path. None of that is a per-person cost.
Backup and disaster recovery
Storage is a real per-user cost and a restore has to be tested to be worth anything. Priced honestly rather than implied.
Firewalls, switches and Wi-Fi
Network gear is per location, not per person, and a five-person office with three sites costs more to keep online than one with a single router.
Hardware and software licences
Your Microsoft 365 and line-of-business subscriptions stay in your name. We manage them, we do not resell them at a markup.
Onboarding and setup costs
Most providers charge a one-time fee of $50 to $250 per user, or a flat $2,000 to $10,000 depending on how tangled the environment is. It buys discovery, documentation, agent deployment, a credential audit and a security baseline.
What we charge
Nothing
No onboarding fee, no setup fee, no minimum term. The work still happens: a call to confirm headcount, one agent installed on each machine, delegated admin on your email platform, and a chat link to bookmark. It takes about a morning for a small office and it is priced into the monthly fee rather than charged up front.
We can afford that because we are not sending anyone to your building to do it. A provider who has to dispatch an engineer for discovery genuinely does incur that cost, and charging for it is fair. Ask which one you are being quoted.
Six things that move your price
In roughly the order they matter. If a quote you are comparing is much higher than another, it is almost always one of these.
- 1
How many people you have
Per-user rates fall as headcount rises almost everywhere, because the fixed cost of knowing your environment is spread further. Our rate does not move, but the monthly minimum means the smallest offices pay the floor rather than the headcount.
- 2
Whether you are regulated
HIPAA, PCI DSS and CMMC add logging, retention, evidence collection and an auditor who will ask your provider questions in writing. Expect $20 to $50 per user, per month on top anywhere that offers it. We do not sell it.
- 3
How often somebody has to be there
Remote-first is the cheapest plan anyone can sell you. A standing weekly on-site visit can double a small contract, because it is a person and a vehicle rather than a licence.
- 4
How old the equipment is
An unsupported operating system, a server past warranty, or a line-of-business app that only runs on one machine all raise the ticket count. Providers who price properly load for this, and providers who do not will re-quote you in month three.
- 5
How much security you are buying
The gap between bundled antivirus and managed detection with someone watching alerts around the clock is the largest single swing in any quote. It is also the line most often left vague, so ask what happens at 2am.
- 6
What the response promise actually says
A 30-minute guarantee has to be staffed 30 minutes wide, and you pay for that staffing whether you use it or not. Ours is a first reply the same business day, which is honest about what a weekday chat desk can do.
Now run your own numbers
You have read what is in and what is out, so your inputs are better than they were at the top of the page.
Back to the calculatorManaged IT versus break-fix
What a 25-person office spends in a year, three ways. We are not the cheapest line in this table and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
| Approach | What you get | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| Break-fix hourly | Nothing between calls. No monitoring, no patching, and the clock starts when you phone. | $7,200 |
| Full-service managed | Phone and out-of-hours cover, on-site engineers, compliance support. At $150 to $200 per user. | $45,000 to $60,000 |
| PriceMe | Chat only, weekdays only, remote only. Monitoring and patching included, everything in the list above is not. |
On these assumptions break-fix is the cheaper line, and not by much. That is a real answer and we would rather print it than pick an incident count that flattered us. What it buys you is nothing between calls: no monitoring, no patching, no offboarding when somebody leaves with their laptop, and a bill that arrives after the problem rather than before it.
The number that decides it is the incident count. At 30 a year break-fix wins. Somewhere around 125 incidents it stops winning, and an unmaintained estate drifts upward every year rather than down. Against a full-service provider the gap is not close either way.
Red flags in an MSP quote
Including ours. Take this list to every provider you are talking to, and ask for the answers in the agreement rather than on the call.
"Unlimited support" with a fair-use clause that is never defined
Ask for the number. If unlimited has a limit, it is written down somewhere.
No written response time, or one with no consequence for missing it
Ask what happens the third time it is missed. A promise with no remedy is marketing.
Per-ticket or per-incident charges inside a flat-fee plan
Ask for last quarter's average invoice against the quoted monthly fee.
A 36-month auto-renewing term with no exit
Ask what it costs to leave in month seven, and get the answer in the agreement.
No documented offboarding or data-return process
Ask who owns the documentation and how you get admin credentials back.
Security licences passed through at an undisclosed markup
Ask for the licence list and the unit price. You can look those up.
Onboarding quoted verbally and missing from the agreement
Ask for it in the same document as the monthly fee, before you sign.
Questions people actually ask
How much do managed IT services cost per user?
Between $100 and $250 per user, per month at a full-service provider in 2026, with $150 to $200 typical for a small business. Remote-only plans with a narrower scope sit well below that band. The calculator on this page prices ours for your own headcount.
What is the average cost of IT support for a small business?
A 10 to 25 person business on a standard managed plan usually budgets $1,500 to $5,000 a month. A remote-only plan sits under that, because there is no phone queue, no on-call rota and no field engineer priced into every seat. Put your headcount into the calculator above for the exact figure.
How much does managed IT cost for a 10-person company?
At a full-service provider, ten people run $1,500 to $2,000 a month. On a remote-only plan it is a small fraction of that, and the difference is scope rather than efficiency. Set the calculator above to ten people to see ours.
Is managed IT cheaper than hiring an in-house IT person?
For most offices under about 40 people, yes. One salaried IT hire is a six-figure cost once you add benefits, and that person is off sick, on holiday and asleep for a good part of the year. A managed plan is a fraction of that, though it will not know your business as well.
Do managed IT services require a long-term contract?
Often, and that is worth checking before anything else. Thirty-six month auto-renewing terms are still common. We do not use one: billed monthly, cancel with 30 days notice, no early termination charge and no setup fee.
What is a typical MSP onboarding fee?
$50 to $250 per user as a one-time charge, or a flat $2,000 to $10,000 depending on how complicated the environment is. It pays for discovery, documentation, agent deployment and a security baseline. It is usually negotiable on a longer term. We do not charge one.
Are software licences included in managed IT pricing?
Almost never for Microsoft 365, Adobe or your line-of-business software. Some providers resell them at a markup, which is worth asking about directly. Security tooling such as endpoint protection is normally bundled into the per-user fee, and it is fair to ask which product it is.
What is co-managed IT and how much does it cost?
Co-managed means the provider works alongside an IT person you already employ, taking the after-hours monitoring and the repetitive tickets. It usually runs 30 to 50 percent below a fully managed rate, around $55 to $110 per user. It makes sense from roughly 75 seats up.
Priced by service
- Microsoft 365 Support PricingMicrosoft 365 management is included in the per-person base plan, under the published monthly minimum. No separate admin fee, no per-mailbox charge.
- Endpoint Management PricingEndpoint management is priced per person rather than per device, on the flat base rate and under the published monthly minimum.
- Patch Management PricingPatching is included in the per-person base plan. No per-endpoint patching fee and no separate RMM charge.
- Network Support CostNetwork gear management is an add-on charged per location, on top of the per-person base plan. Priced per site, not per device.
- Firewall Management CostFirewall monitoring and routine rule work is part of the per-location network add-on. Advanced configuration and VPN work is quoted per project.
Price your own office in thirty seconds
Set your headcount, tell us who you are, and the whole rate card unlocks. It is a quote request, not an order.
Get your estimate