Most of the executives we talk to think of the cost of IT support as the amount on the invoice at the end of the month. That is only the visible part. The real cost hides in hours employees spend waiting, in postponed updates, and in problems nobody reported because they “did not want to waste time and pay for it”.
Two models are still common: hourly, where you pay for every hour of work logged, and fixed, where you pay one price per user per month and everything is included. On paper the two can look similar, but they create completely different behaviour, both in your employees and in the provider.
In this article we show where the hourly model costs more than the invoice suggests, what a fixed package must cover, and how to compare two quotes so that you are comparing the same thing.
Why the hourly model costs more than the invoice shows
The hourly model has one fundamental flaw: the provider earns when you have problems. The more failures, the more hours. That does not mean the provider causes them deliberately, but it has no financial incentive to invest in prevention, such as updates, monitoring and documentation, because that work is usually not paid for.
The second hidden cost is employee behaviour. When every call becomes a line on the invoice, people start to economise. An accountant whose Outlook freezes several times a day restarts the computer and keeps working. A sales manager who sees a suspicious email simply deletes it and tells no one. A minor problem that would have been fixed in ten minutes becomes a habit, and a suspicious email becomes an unnoticed incident.
The third is management overhead. Someone in your company has to check the hours reports, argue about whether “two hours to install a printer” is justified, and plan a budget that cannot be planned. In our experience finance directors name this as the biggest drawback of the hourly model: the monthly invoice can vary several times over, and the reason is often unclear.
The fourth is postponed work. When updates, backup checks or access reviews are billed separately, they get pushed to “next month”. The company quietly accumulates technical debt, which one day surfaces as a serious failure or a security incident.
How one price per user changes behaviour
The fixed model flips the incentives. When you pay one price per user and everything is included, the provider earns the most when there are the fewest problems. So it pays for them to set up monitoring, patch systems at night, and remove the root causes of recurring failures instead of treating the symptoms every week.
What happens on your side matters just as much. Employees who know that a call to the helpdesk costs nothing extra call sooner. That is not a minor point. A slow computer reported on day one usually means a full disk or an unneeded program. The same computer after two months of silence can mean malware that has been sending out data the whole time. A suspicious email reported immediately lets us block the sender for the whole company. Deleted quietly, it leaves the other twenty employees without a warning.
Our experience is that after a move to the fixed model, the number of requests usually rises in the first months and then falls below the starting level. It rises because people finally report what they had been putting up with. It falls because the causes are removed rather than papered over.
For a finance director, the fixed model delivers what the hourly one cannot: a predictable budget. The number of users changes rarely and in a planned way, so the IT support line becomes as predictable as rent or licences.
What a fixed package must include
This is where the biggest risk lies. A “fixed price” means very different things at different providers. Some include only the helpdesk and bill on-site visits, servers or projects separately. The fixed model then becomes an hourly model with a different label.
In our view, a truly fixed per-user package should cover at least the following:
- A helpdesk for employees with no request limit: by phone, email and remote access, with a clear response time.
- Workstation management: operating system and application updates, antivirus protection, disk encryption, periodic health checks.
- Server and network management: updates, monitoring, log review, backup verification, whether the servers are on your premises or in the cloud.
- User administration: creating accounts for a new employee, disabling access for a departing one, managing passwords and 2FA.
- Administration of Microsoft 365 or another email platform, and upkeep of its security settings.
- On-site visits to the office when a problem cannot be solved remotely.
- Documentation and periodic reports: what we did, what keeps recurring, what we recommend changing.
- Help with purchasing equipment and licences, with no commissions or “setup fees”.
What usually and fairly remains outside the package: large projects (a migration to a new system, building the network for a new office), software licences and the hardware itself. What matters is that these boundaries are written into the contract, not explained verbally.
This is exactly how our IT support for businesses works: one final price per user, with no hour counting and no separate invoices for visits.
How to compare quotes so you compare the same thing
When you have several quotes, do not compare the number at the bottom. Compare what you get for it. We suggest this order:
- Add up your real IT costs for the past twelve months: all hourly invoices, on-site visits, “projects” that were in fact maintenance, and the time of any internal employee spent on IT problems. This is your baseline.
- Ask each provider to write out what is included and what is not. If the answer sounds like “it depends on the situation”, treat it as not included.
- Check the response time and how it is measured. “We respond quickly” is not a commitment. Ask for specific minutes and a written service level agreement (SLA).
- Ask what happens proactively: how often updates are deployed, who checks the backups, and whether there is monitoring that alerts the provider before it alerts you.
- Find out how the price changes as headcount grows or shrinks, and what the termination terms are.
- Ask about security and compliance requirements. If NIS2 or DORA applies to your company, support has to be organised so that during an audit you can show processes, not just invoices.
A common mistake is to compare a fixed price with a “quiet month” of the hourly model. The right comparison is with the annual average, including the worst months.
When the hourly model does make sense
It would be wrong to say the hourly model never fits. It makes sense when you have your own IT team and need outside help only for rare, specialised work. It suits one-off projects with a clear start and end. It can suit a very small company with a few computers, where the amount of problems is truly minimal.
But as soon as a company has ten or more workstations, a server or a Microsoft 365 tenant, and customer data it is obliged to protect, the hourly model almost always becomes more expensive, only the cost is spread across several lines that nobody adds up.
Where to start
If you pay by the hour today and are not sure it is worth it, we suggest these steps:
- Collect twelve months of IT invoices and put them in one table together with the time of any internal employee. This number alone often comes as a surprise.
- List what was left undone over those twelve months: updates not installed, backups not checked, access of former employees not disabled. This is your technical debt.
- Ask for a fixed quote with the scope of services and the response time written out. In our IT support quote, all of this is laid out on one page.
- If you have servers, ask separately whether their management is included or whether you will need a separate server management contract.
- Start with a trial period and after three months compare not only the invoice but also the number of requests, their resolution time and employee feedback.
The cost of IT support is not what you pay the provider but what you lose when it does not work. A fixed model makes that cost visible and manageable.
