The Real Cost of Managed IT

How Much Does Managed IT Support Cost for Small Businesses?

Last week a chap rang me up – runs a lovely little business the other side of Canterbury, about 18 staff, two offices, the usual. He’d been on the hunt for a new IT company and he was, in his own words, “going slightly mad.”

“Jacqui,” he said, “I’ve had three quotes. One’s £45 a user. One’s £900 a month flat. One bloke wants to charge me per machine and per server and per cup of tea. Why can’t anyone just tell me how much it’s going to cost?”

Fair question. And one I get asked at least once or twice a month, usually by somebody who’s tearing their hair out.

So let me have a proper go at answering it – without the smoke and mirrors.

Why “managed IT support” isn’t one thing

Here’s the bit that makes pricing tricky. Managed IT isn’t a single product. It’s a bundle of stuff that different firms bundle differently.

One company’s “managed IT” is a chap with a van who’ll come out when something breaks. Another’s is a full team of engineers, monitoring your kit 24/7, patching your servers at three in the morning, and on the phone before you’ve even noticed the problem. Same words on the tin. Wildly different things in the box.

And that’s before you get into who pays for what. Are Microsoft 365 licences part of the price, or extra? Does “support” include your printer playing up, or is that £100 for a callout? What about when somebody spills tea on a laptop at half four on a Friday – is that covered, or is that a project?

Until you know what’s actually in the contract, the £ figure on the front means very little.

What actually drives the cost

Once you strip the nonsense away, the real cost comes down to a handful of honest things.

  • How many people you’ve got. A 12-person business genuinely costs less to look after than a 60-person one. More users means more devices, more passwords, more leavers and joiners, more “I can’t get into my email” calls on a Monday morning.
  • How many devices. Some firms are five staff and three machines each – laptop, desktop, phone. Others are 30 staff and one shared PC in the office. Counting people gets you halfway. Counting kit gets you the other half.
  • Onsite or remote. If everyone works from home in their kitchen, your IT person may not need to drive anywhere. If you’ve got a proper office with servers humming away in a cupboard, somebody’s going to have to turn up sometimes.
  • What’s actually covered. Cyber security. Patching. Backup. User training. Project work when you move offices or roll out new software. Each one of those is either in the price or out of it. There’s no industry standard. You have to ask.
  • How fast you want answers. “We’ll get to you within four hours” and “we’ll pick up on the second ring” are very different services with very different price tags.

How we do it at JJ Systems – three contracts, no surprises

I’ll be straight with you about how we charge, because I think it helps when you’re comparing us to anyone else.

We do three things. They build on each other.

Premium Plus is the full ticket. Unlimited remote and onsite support – fair use, obviously, we’re not running a 24-hour pizza delivery – plus all the labour for projects, cyber security planning, disaster recovery, the lot. It’s a fixed monthly retainer across your whole estate – not per user, not per machine, just one number for the lot. Honestly, the easiest way to think about it is that you’ve taken on a complete member of staff. On call, onsite, and on your side, but without the payroll headache, the holiday cover, or somebody handing in their notice in January. Project work is in. Office move is in. Rolling out a new bit of software next quarter is in. You know what you’re paying. We know what we’re doing. No nasty invoices arriving in February for a bit of work somebody forgot to mention in November. Click through to our Premium Plus Maintenance service page to read more details about exactly what is included and what happens next.

Premium Plus Remote is for businesses where everyone works from home, or you’ve got people scattered across different sites and offices. Same proper proactive support, all of it remote, including support for third party products, that’s the extra bit, charged per machine again. No retainer. Good fit if you have accounts systems that need updating regularly and users that need desktop help consistently. Find out more on our Premium Plus Remote service page.

Premium is our base. Reactive support when something goes wrong, plus the proactive stuff like patching for operating systems and device monitoring so things go wrong less often. It’s the floor – you wouldn’t want anything less than this looking after your business. So we do cover operating systems and three core 365 products, but we don’t cover third party products, like accounting software, industry operational software, drawing and CAD software etc etc or the periphery products.

When somebody asks me which one they should be on, my honest answer is normally start with Premium Plus Remote. Most businesses with under 100 users are on Microsoft 365 Business Standard, but need more support than they think they do, and the predictable monthly cost is what their finance person actually wants. If it turns out you don’t need all of it, we can have that conversation and drop you down, or if you have large onsite projects, policy needs or complex systems, move you up.

And then there’s your email – charged separately, on purpose

This one trips people up, so I’ll be upfront.

A fair few of our clients don’t want us near their laptops – maybe they’ve got somebody for that, maybe they don’t have much kit to fuss over. But they absolutely want their 365 looked after properly. So we keep that bit separate, charged per mailbox.

And the mailbox fee isn’t just “we’ll have a look if Outlook stops working.” It bundles in:

  • Domain registration
  • Domain hosting
  • Email scanning – the proper kind, that catches the dodgy stuff before it lands in someone’s inbox at 8am
  • An email archive service that sits outside the Microsoft world – so if Microsoft is having one of its days, your emails are still where you left them

If you’re on Premium Plus you get a discount on the mailbox fee. It’s still on top, mind – we won’t pretend it’s free – but it’s lighter. We’d rather show you what you’re paying for than bury it inside a bigger number and hope you don’t notice.

What sits outside the contract

A few other things genuinely aren’t part of any IT support contract – ours or anyone else’s. Worth knowing about so you’re not caught out:

  • Microsoft 365 licences (the actual subscription per user)
  • Antivirus and email security licences
  • Hardware – laptops, servers, screens, the bits of kit themselves
  • Email hosting if you’ve got something specialist

We can sort all of that for you – in fact, most of our clients prefer it that way because it’s one bill, one phone number, one team. Anyone who tells you it’s all-in for £25 a user including licences is either fibbing or they’ll be coming back for the difference later.

So, what should you actually expect to pay?

Honestly? It depends. Anyone who gives you a flat answer without asking how many staff you’ve got, what kit you’re running, and what you actually need, isn’t quoting – they’re guessing.

What I’d say is this. If a quote sounds astonishingly cheap, ask what’s not in it. If it sounds dear, ask what is. The middle ground – proper proactive support, real engineers, predictable monthly bill, all the awkward stuff covered – is where most well-run small businesses end up. And that’s where it should be.

If you want to talk through what your business would actually cost to look after, give me a call on 01227 371375. I’ll ask you about a dozen sensible questions, you’ll ask me a dozen back, and within twenty minutes you’ll know exactly where you stand. No smoke. No mirrors. No surprises.

Jacqui Offen IT Director, JJ Systems UK Ltd