Managed IT support vs break-fix: the actual arithmetic

The choice between managed IT support and break-fix is usually presented as a philosophical one: proactive versus reactive, partnership versus transaction, and it is really just arithmetic. Here is the arithmetic.

Ten users on a £70 per user plan costs £700 a month, or £8,400 a year. At a break-fix rate of £85 an hour, that buys about 99 hours, which is a little under two hours a week. If your business genuinely consumes less than two hours of IT attention a week, break-fix is cheaper. If it consumes more, it is not.

The complication is that the two hours is not comparing like with like. Break-fix covers fixing. It does not cover patching, monitoring, backup verification, licence management or anything else preventative, because none of those generate a call-out. So the real comparison is two hours of fixing against a service that also removes a proportion of the faults before they happen.

Where does the crossover actually fall? Under about five users, break-fix usually still wins, and any provider telling a four-person business it needs a managed plan is selling rather than advising. Between five and ten it depends on how much equipment you have and how much it matters when it stops. Above ten, managed support is almost always cheaper in practice.

Two costs sit outside the calculation and both favour managed support. The first is the hesitation cost: with break-fix you weigh up every call, so small faults accumulate. The second is that break-fix providers, entirely reasonably, prioritise contracted clients when both call on the same morning.

One case where break-fix genuinely remains the right answer regardless of size: a business running almost entirely on cloud services with a small number of laptops, no server, no line-of-business software and a workforce comfortable with technology. There is simply less to manage, and paying a monthly fee to manage it is poor value. We tell businesses in that position exactly that.

There is a third model worth knowing about, because it sits between the two and suits a particular kind of business: a small monthly fee covering monitoring, patching, antivirus and backup, with all labour charged hourly on top. You get the preventative half without the unlimited helpdesk.

It works well for businesses with technically confident staff who genuinely handle their own day-to-day problems but have no way of knowing whether a machine is unpatched or a backup has silently failed. It works badly for anyone who would then hesitate to call, because you are back to the hesitation cost with a subscription attached.

Whichever model you land on, do the arithmetic on your own numbers rather than on a provider’s example. Count the hours you actually consumed last year, count the times somebody came out, and price all three models against those figures. The answer is usually clear once it is written down, and it is frequently not the one the provider recommended.

• Managed IT vs Break-Fix, Where the crossover between paying by the hour and paying by the month actually falls, on published rates.
• Monthly Support Plans, Three plans with published prices, on-site included from £70 per user, and a coverage area measured in miles.
• Pricing