How Much Do Managed IT Services Cost?

• Security depth — managed endpoint detection and response, email security, identity protection and conditional access enforcement
• Backup and recovery scope — endpoints, servers, Microsoft 365 data, immutability and whether restores are tested
• Coverage window — business hours versus genuine 24/7 response with a named escalation path
• Strategy — whether vCIO roadmapping, budgeting and vendor management are included or billed
• Project treatment — what counts as included change versus a separately quoted project
• Environment complexity — sites, servers, plant floor equipment, ERP and line-of-business systems
• Compliance obligations — evidence collection, log retention and audit support

Per-user pricing follows the thing that actually generates support demand: a person. It stays predictable when someone gains a second laptop, a tablet and a phone, and it does not create an incentive to under-count devices.

Per-device pricing can still be the better structure in device-heavy environments — shared plant terminals, kiosks or shift-based workstations, where devices outnumber people substantially.

• Ask each provider to state the scope document, not the feature list
• Confirm whether security tooling licensing is inside the per-user number
• Confirm whether Microsoft 365 data protection is included
• Ask what response commitment applies at 2am, and who is contractually on the hook
• Ask what work is explicitly excluded and billed as a project
• Ask who holds administrative credentials, and what happens to documentation if the relationship ends

• Microsoft 365 and other software licensing
• Hardware refresh — endpoints, firewalls, switches, access points
• One-time onboarding and remediation to bring the environment to standard
• Major projects such as ERP implementation, cloud migration or plant network builds
• Circuits and internet redundancy

The cheapest agreements typically exclude the expensive things: monitored endpoint response, tested restores, after-hours coverage and remediation of what they inherit. The cost does not disappear — it reappears as project invoices, or as downtime.

The fair comparison is total cost of coverage over a year, including what each provider would bill for the work the other one includes.

We scope from the environment, not from a price list: an assessment of identity, endpoints, network, backup, recovery objectives and business systems, then a per-user figure up to $225 per month reflecting the services actually included.

Non-contract and project work is quoted per engagement, because the variables — environment condition, scope and timeline — differ too much for a single published rate to be honest.