Managed IT quotes are hard to compare because providers price the same work in different shapes. Two proposals can look thousands apart and end up costing the same, or look identical and diverge the moment something goes wrong. Here is what each model actually does to your bill.
Per-user
You pay a flat monthly amount for every person supported, regardless of how many devices they use.
Behaves well when people have a laptop, a phone and maybe a desk setup. The count follows headcount, which finance already forecasts, so budgeting is easy.
Watch for what counts as a user. Do shared machines, part-time staff, or the reception terminal nobody logs into count? Get the definition in writing, because it is the number your invoice is built on.
Per-device
You pay per endpoint: workstations, laptops, servers, sometimes network hardware.
Behaves well when device count is stable and lower than headcount — shift work, shared terminals, a warehouse floor.
Watch for the incentive it creates. Under per-device pricing, retiring an old machine reduces someone's revenue. Ask how end-of-life devices are handled, and whether there is a separate charge for the server.
Tiered packages
Bronze, silver, gold — bundles that add services as you climb.
Behaves well when you want a defined scope and a predictable renewal conversation.
Watch for what sits one tier above you. The item you will need most often — after-hours cover, security monitoring, backup testing — has a way of being on the next tier up. Read the tier boundaries before the tier contents.
Block hours
You buy a bank of hours up front and draw them down.
Behaves well when work is genuinely project-shaped and occasional.
Watch for the incentive it creates on support: every hour spent stopping problems from happening is an hour that cannot be billed. Block hours reward firefighting and quietly punish prevention. Also check whether unused hours expire and how they are rounded — 15-minute rounding on a dozen small tickets adds up.
Break-fix
No retainer. You call when something breaks and pay for the fix.
Behaves well when you are very small, tolerant of downtime, and have no compliance obligations.
Watch for the maths. Break-fix looks cheapest right up until the week you needed someone urgently and joined a queue behind the contracted clients. You are also paying for outcomes, not prevention — nobody is patching anything between your calls.
What sits outside every model
Almost all of these price the support, not the stack. Ask explicitly which of these is included versus billed separately:
- Software licences — Microsoft 365, security tooling, backup platforms
- Hardware and procurement
- Projects: migrations, office moves, new sites
- After-hours and emergency response
- Onboarding and offboarding of staff
- The initial discovery and documentation work
A cheap monthly number with everything above billed separately is not a cheap contract. It is an unpredictable one.
Questions that make quotes comparable
Ask every provider the same five things, and put the answers side by side:
- What exactly is a "user" or "device" under this agreement?
- What is explicitly out of scope and billed hourly?
- What are the response targets by severity, and what happens after hours?
- What does onboarding cost, and what do we get from it?
- What is the notice period, and what happens to our documentation and access if we leave?
That last one matters more than the monthly figure. A provider who has thought about how you would leave has usually thought properly about how you are supported while you stay.
The honest answer on price
Nobody can quote a real number for managed IT from a web page, and treating a published figure as a quote is how businesses end up comparing two things that were never the same. The number depends on how many people you have, how many sites, how old the equipment is, what shape the network is in and what obligations your sector carries.
What you can insist on is that the number is explained: what drives it, what makes it go up, and what is included before anyone says the word "additional."
Before you sign whichever quote wins, work through the 12 questions worth asking before an MSP contract. For how we price our own managed IT services, the FAQ has the short version, and a free IT assessment is how you get the long one for your own environment.