Comparison
Managed IT support or break-fix: where the crossover falls
This gets sold as a philosophy, proactive against reactive, and it is really arithmetic. Break-fix costs £85 an hour and nothing when nothing breaks. A plan costs £40 to £100 per user a month and nothing extra when something does. The question is only which side of the crossing point your business sits on, and it is a question you can answer with last year’s numbers.
- £85/hr against £40 to £100
- Crossover at five to ten users
- Three models, not two
Three models, not two
Break-fix is hourly. You ring when something stops working, somebody fixes it, and you get an invoice for the time. Nothing is happening in the background, because nothing in the background generates a call-out.
A managed plan is a fixed monthly fee per user. It covers the helpdesk, and it also covers the work you never see: patching, monitoring, antivirus management, backup verification and account administration. The fee does not move when you have a bad month.
The third model sits between them and is the one people are most often on without knowing it has a name. A monthly fee covers monitoring, patching, antivirus and backup, and all labour is charged hourly on top. You get the preventative half without the unlimited helpdesk, and the bill is partly predictable rather than fixed.
All three are legitimate. Which one is right depends on how many people you employ, how much kit they depend on, and how expensive an hour of nobody working actually is.
What is inside a plan, and what the response times are, sits under business IT support.
The three models side by side
| Break-fix | Monitoring plus hourly | Managed plan | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What you pay each month | Nothing until something breaks | A monitoring fee per device or user | £40 to £100 per user, published |
| What a fault costs on top | £85 an hour | £85 an hour | Nothing inside the plan |
| A quiet year | The cheapest of the three | Close to the monitoring fee alone | The full annual fee |
| A bad year | Uncapped | Uncapped labour | Unchanged |
| Patching and monitoring | Not covered, it raises no call-out | Covered | Covered |
| Backups | Checked when you ask | Monitored, restores charged | Tested restores on a schedule |
| Who gets seen first on a bad morning | Contracted clients, then you | Varies by provider | Plan clients, by plan level |
| On-site visits | Charged per visit plus travel | Charged per visit plus travel | Included within 15 miles on Support and above |
| Budgeting | Unpredictable | Partly predictable | Fixed and known in advance |
| Best for | Under about five users | Confident staff, thin cover | Ten or more, or anything that stops trade |
The arithmetic, on ten users
Ten users on our £70 plan is £700 a month, or £8,400 a year. At £85 an hour that same money buys about 99 hours of break-fix, 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 those two hours are not comparing like with like. Break-fix buys fixing. It does not buy patching, monitoring, backup verification or licence management, because none of those produce a fault to bill for. So the honest comparison is two hours of repair against a service that also removes a share of the faults before anyone notices them.
Run the sum on your own figures rather than on ours. Count the hours you actually paid for last year, count the visits, and price all three models against those numbers. The answer is usually obvious once it is written down, and it is frequently not the one your provider recommended.
Every rate used on this page is on our published prices.
If you would rather read it as a single worked case than as a comparison, we have the same arithmetic worked through as one example.
Where break-fix genuinely wins
Under about five users it usually still wins, and any provider telling a four-person business it needs a managed plan is selling rather than advising. There is not enough equipment for the preventative half to earn its fee.
It also wins, regardless of size, for a business running almost entirely on cloud services: a handful of laptops, no server, no line-of-business software, and a team comfortable enough with technology to handle their own day-to-day. There is simply less to manage, and paying monthly to manage it is poor value. We tell businesses in that position exactly that, and it costs us the work.
The third case is a business with a genuinely capable internal person. They handle the desk-side problems, and what they cannot see is whether a machine is unpatched or a backup has silently failed. That is the position monitoring-plus-hourly was designed for.
The two costs nobody puts in the spreadsheet
The first is hesitation. On break-fix you weigh up every call, because every call has a price attached. Small faults accumulate, workarounds become permanent, and the thing that finally gets reported is the fourth symptom of a problem that has been building for months.
The second is queue position. Break-fix providers, entirely reasonably, look after contracted clients first when both ring on the same morning. That is not a criticism of them. It is the arrangement working exactly as designed, and it is worth pricing in before a Monday when it matters.
- A fault you did not report costs nothing until it does
- Contracted clients are seen first, which is the deal they paid for
- Preventative work never generates a call-out, so it never happens
Work out which model you are actually on
Ten minutes with last year’s invoices answers this better than any comparison page can.
- Add up every IT invoice from the last twelve months, including on-site travel
- Count the hours those invoices represent, and divide by 52
- Count how many of those calls were faults, and how many were work that could have been planned
- Write down the faults you did not report because of the call-out charge
- Ask when your backups were last restored from, not when they last ran
- Ask who patches the machines, and what evidence there is that it happened
- Work out what an hour of the whole team not working costs you
- Multiply your user count by £70 and compare it to the first number
Have the sum done on your own numbers
The free review counts what your current arrangement actually costs, including the hours nobody bills you for, and puts a recommendation in writing.
Where the answer is to stay on break-fix, it says so. That happens often enough with businesses under five users that it is worth saying up front.
Get in touch
Talk to us about managed it vs break-fix
A few lines is enough. We will tell you straight whether we can help, what it would cost and how quickly we can be there. No hard sell, and no follow-up sequence if you decide against it.
- We reply within one working day
- A straight answer, including when it is no
- Free process review available, before any money changes hands
Would rather just ring? 01623 354250, Mon–Fri, 9am–5:30pm.
Frequently asked questions
If the answer is not here, ask us. You will get a straight one, from someone who does the work.
Mon–Fri, 9am–5:30pm
When does a monthly IT plan become cheaper than paying by the hour?
Somewhere between five and ten users for most businesses. Ten users on our £70 plan is £8,400 a year, which buys about 99 hours at £85, or just under two hours a week. Consume more than that and the plan is cheaper before you count anything preventative.
Is break-fix ever the right answer?
Yes, in three cases: under about five users, a business running almost entirely on cloud services with a few laptops and no server, or a team with a genuinely capable internal person handling the day-to-day. We tell businesses in those positions to stay where they are.
What is monitoring-only IT support?
A monthly fee covering monitoring, patching, antivirus and backup, with all labour charged hourly on top. It buys the preventative half without the unlimited helpdesk, and it suits confident staff who need to know a backup has failed rather than needing somebody to answer the phone.
How do we count what break-fix cost us last year?
Add up twelve months of IT invoices including on-site travel, then add the faults you chose not to report because of the call-out charge and the hours your staff spent working around them. The second half is the number that decides it, and it is the one nobody writes down.
Can we start pay-as-you-go and move to a plan later?
Yes, and plenty of clients do exactly that. We work pay-as-you-go at £85 an hour with no minimum commitment, and most businesses move onto a plan once they have added up a few months of call-outs and seen the shape of it.
Does the crossover point move as we grow?
It moves in favour of a plan every time you hire. Break-fix costs scale with the number of things that can break, and the preventative work that stops them is a fixed effort spread across more users. Ten is where it is clear for most businesses; twenty makes it obvious.
