What does IT support cost per user per month?

Ours is £42, £55 or £72 per user per month excluding VAT, and the whole rate card is on the pricing page rather than behind a form.

That is an unusual thing to publish, which is worth being straight about. Most providers in this industry will not give you a number without a meeting first, so if somebody quotes you an industry average for managed IT support, they have made it up or read it in a marketing report that made it up. There is no reliable published figure, because most of the market does not publish.

What do you get at each level?

Essential, £42 per user per month. Unlimited remote and on site support, helpdesk 9am to 5pm Monday to Friday, NinjaOne remote monitoring and management, updates and patching, backup of Microsoft 365 email and files including testing that it restores, and starters, leavers and moves.

That is IT support without the security layer, and we say plainly on the pricing page that most businesses need more than it. If the only thing protecting you is what came built into Microsoft 365, nobody is watching for a compromised account and nothing is catching the phishing email that gets through.

Secure, £55 per user per month. Everything above, plus Bitdefender endpoint protection with Advanced Threat Security and 24 hour human monitoring behind it, Check Point advanced email security, DMARC domain protection, DefensX DNS and browser protection, vulnerability scanning and management, and security awareness training.

This is the level most of our clients are on and the one we recommend. It is also the level that answers the questions an insurer or a client asks you.

Secure+, £72 per user per month. Everything above, plus quarterly vCIO meetings, Cyber Essentials readiness and extended hours support. For businesses that want IT on the agenda rather than in the background.

What is not in the monthly fee?

This is the part that decides whether a comparison between two providers means anything.

• Projects. Migrations, office moves, server replacements. Scoped and quoted before anything starts. Day to day changes are included, and so is a handful of them at once.
• Hardware. We source and supply it based on what you actually need, so machines arrive built, licensed and on the right warranty.
• Cyber Essentials certification. The assessment fee and the work to get you through it, laid out in full at the start including what the certifying body charges.
• Cloud, telecoms and connectivity. Phone systems, broadband and mobile, priced separately as their own lines on the same invoice.
• Backup beyond Microsoft 365. Servers and on premises data are priced on how much there is to protect.

What is not on that list matters as much as what is. There is no charge per ticket, no hourly rate for support, no call out fee, and no separate line for the monitoring tools.

Why does hourly billing cost more than it looks?

Because of what it does to behaviour.

A team that gets billed by the hour learns to put up with things. The printer that only works if you do it in a particular order, the laptop that takes four minutes to wake up, the shared drive nobody can find anything on. None of it is worth a phone call at £95 an hour, so nobody makes the call. Then a dozen small annoyances accumulate and one of them turns into a stoppage.

The other thing hourly billing does is make the invoice unpredictable, which for a business of 5 to 60 people is often the real complaint. You cannot budget for it and you cannot tell whether a big month means you had a bad month or your provider had a good one.

A fixed fee changes who carries that risk. If something is badly built, it costs us to keep fixing it, so we have an interest in fixing it properly the first time.

How do you compare two quotes properly?

Two proposals at very different prices are usually not describing the same service. Work through this list and they become comparable:

1. Is endpoint protection included, and is a human watching it? Antivirus on a machine and managed detection and response with a 24 hour team behind it are different products at different prices. Ask which one is in the number.
2. Is email security included, beyond what Microsoft gives you?
3. Is backup included, and has anyone tested a restore?
4. Is security awareness training in there, or an extra?
5. What are the support hours, and what happens outside them?
6. Is support genuinely unlimited, or is there a fair use clause with a number in it?
7. Who actually answers? Ask how many people are in the team and whether first line is offshore.
8. What is the onboarding cost and what does it cover?
9. How long is the term, and what happens at the end of it?

If a provider will not answer those in writing, that is your answer.

What about the one off costs?

There is an onboarding fee, tiered by the size of the business, and it is real work rather than an admin charge. Documenting an environment nobody has documented, fixing what is broken before it becomes our problem, getting the monitoring and security tools deployed. Sign for 36 months and we halve it.

The minimum term is 12 months.

Is cheaper ever the right answer?

Sometimes, and we will tell you when.

I sat with a business owner last year who knew his security was not where it should be and had been quoted something eye watering by somebody else. We went through the list together, most valuable to least valuable for his particular business, and I told him what I would not spend money on if I were in his seat. He looked surprised, which is fair enough, because usually the person on the other side of that table has a target to hit.

He got to a genuinely good setup for a lot less than he had been quoted, and the things we left out he can add later if the business changes. He is still a client. That is roughly how I think it should work.

What to do next

The full rate card, including what sits outside the monthly fee and the date it was last reviewed, is on the pricing page. What is actually covered day to day is on the IT support page, and the security detail is on the cyber security page.

If you want a number for your business rather than a range, tell us how many people you have and you will get one. We will not ask to see your current bill first.