Ask five providers what IT support costs and you will get five numbers that are impossible to compare: one per user, one per device, one flat monthly, one hourly, and one "it depends." None of them is lying. They are just quoting different things, and the differences are where budgets go to die.
So here are the typical market ranges, in plain numbers, along with what actually moves the price and how to line up quotes so you are comparing the same thing. These are the ranges we see across the mid-Atlantic market; your quotes should land somewhere inside them, and if they do not, you deserve a clear explanation of why.
The typical ranges
| Model | Typical range | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Fully managed, per user | $100 to $250 per user per month | Provider owns everything: help desk, security, patching, backups, planning |
| Co-managed | $50 to $125 per user per month | You have internal IT; the provider adds tools, escalation, and coverage |
| Per device | $30 to $100 per device per month | Priced by computers and servers rather than people |
| Break-fix hourly | $100 to $225 per hour | No contract; you pay when something breaks |
For a typical 20-person business on a fully managed agreement, that works out to roughly $2,000 to $5,000 a month. Wide range? Yes, and the spread is not noise. It reflects real differences in what is included, which is the entire game when comparing quotes.
Why the same business gets quoted $110 and $240
Three things drive most of the gap:
- Security depth. The low end usually means antivirus and patching. The high end typically includes managed detection and response, MFA enforcement, security awareness training, email filtering, and support for cyber insurance requirements. This is the biggest single driver, and the one most worth paying for.
- What counts as "included." Some agreements cover unlimited remote and onsite support. Others cover remote only, or cap hours, or bill projects separately. Two identical-looking monthly numbers can differ by thousands a year once real usage hits the fine print.
- Your environment. Servers on premises, compliance requirements (HIPAA, CMMC, and the like), specialty line-of-business software, and multiple locations all push you up the range honestly. A ten-person cloud-only firm should not be paying like a regulated 40-person firm with two offices.
How to compare quotes without getting played
Make every provider answer the same five questions in writing:
- What is the all-in monthly number for my user count, and what makes it go up?
- Is onsite support included, or billed separately?
- Which security tools are included, by function (endpoint protection, MFA, email filtering, backup, monitoring), not by brand name?
- What is a "project," and what does project work cost?
- What are the contract term, the notice period, and the exit process?
That last one matters more than people think. A quote $30 cheaper per user with a three-year term and a 90-day notice window is not cheaper; it is a bet that you will not want to leave, made by the party that controls whether you will want to leave. We are month-to-month on principle for exactly this reason: a provider who is easy to fire has to stay worth keeping.
The prices that should worry you
Suspiciously cheap has a shape. A $60-per-user "fully managed" quote is usually missing security substance, staffed too thin to hit response times, or planning to make it up on projects and after-hours billing. You find out which one during your first real incident. If your current provider is cheap and you have seen tickets stall, repeat problems, or a mystery invoice, you are not saving money; you are deferring a bill. Our list of signs you should fire your IT provider covers how that pattern plays out.
Expensive-and-vague is the other failure mode: a premium price with no itemization, growing quietly each quarter. Price is not the red flag there; the silence is. There is a longer list of these patterns in our guide to IT provider red flags worth catching early.
The cost nobody quotes: bad IT
The most expensive IT support is the kind that does not work. An hour of company-wide downtime costs a 20-person business roughly a day of one person's payroll, before you count missed calls and lost work product. A recovered-from ransomware incident routinely runs into five or six figures. Slow response times are a payroll tax paid in your employees' waiting time, and unlike the monthly invoice, that cost never shows up on a statement anyone reviews. When you compare a $130 provider who answers in fifteen minutes against a $100 provider who answers in two days, the $130 provider is usually the cheap one.
What switching costs (less than you think)
The fear that switching means paying two providers for months keeps a lot of businesses overpaying for years. In practice, overlap is measured in weeks, not months: most SMB switches complete in one to three weeks (here is the full timeline, phase by phase), and the assessment that tells you what you should be paying costs nothing. We put it in writing within 48 hours: what you have, what it should cost, and what moving looks like. If the numbers say your current provider is a fair deal, the plan tells you that too.
Find out what you should be paying
Send us your user count and current bill. You get a written comparison and switch plan in 48 hours, free, whether you switch or not.
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