If you are currently paying by the hour and trying to work out whether a monthly agreement is better value, this page is the arithmetic rather than the argument. What sits inside the fee, what stays outside it, how the number is calculated, what changes operationally in your first week, and what happens if you decide to leave.
We quote after looking at what you actually have. The assessment behind the number takes about a week and you keep the written result either way.
Three fields. We will reply with what we need to count and how long it takes.
Your details are not passed on.
There is no list price on this page, because a single number for managed IT would have to be invented. The figure is assembled from a small set of things that can be counted in your environment, and you are entitled to check every one of them against what you know you have.
The largest single input. A supported person is somebody with their own account who can raise a ticket. A shared terminal on a shop floor or a reception desk is counted as a device instead, because it produces a different kind of work. Seasonal staff move the count up and down monthly rather than being fixed for a year.
Each server we monitor and patch carries its own weight, physical or virtual, and so does each firewall. A second building adds a second network to keep working and somebody who can reach it, which is why premises count separately from headcount.
Some businesses hand over the whole estate. Others keep one application with the vendor who wrote it and want us for everything around it. A narrower scope means a lower figure, and the boundary is written into the agreement so that it is not relitigated on the day something breaks near the edge of it.
| What changes | Effect on the monthly figure |
|---|---|
| People joining or leaving | Adjusted on the next invoice, in both directions. There is no administrative charge for changing the count. |
| An operating system past its support date | Raises it. Unsupported systems take more work and carry more risk, and we would rather price that honestly than absorb it and quietly resent it. |
| More than one location | Raises it, mostly through travel and a second set of network equipment to maintain. |
| A standardised estate | Lowers it. Fewer machine types and a single identity system means materially fewer things that can go wrong. |
| Cover outside business hours | Priced as its own line rather than blended in, so you can see what it costs and decide whether you need it. |
| Compliance obligations | Raises it where evidence has to be produced and retained on a schedule, because that is recurring work rather than a one-off configuration. |
You receive the calculation rather than only the total, and the counts it rests on are written into the agreement. That is deliberate: it means you can audit an invoice against something, and it means we have to justify an increase rather than announce one.
Scope appears in the agreement as a list rather than as a description. This is the standard list; yours will differ wherever we have agreed something else and written it down.
Your people contact us directly about anything that stops them working: accounts, email, printing, laptops, mobile devices, software faults, new starters and leavers. We do not meter tickets, so nobody on your side has to weigh up whether an issue is worth logging.
Servers, workstations and network equipment watched continuously. Operating system and application patching on a schedule, inside a maintenance window we agree with you rather than one we choose. Capacity warnings, failed jobs and hardware faults are acted on whether or not anybody noticed them.
We check that jobs complete and, separately, that a restore actually returns the data, which is not the same test. Recovering an individual file or mailbox is covered work rather than something billed as an incident.
Endpoint protection deployed and monitored, multi-factor authentication maintained rather than merely switched on once, and a standing review of who holds administrative rights to what. We hold a SOC 2 Type 2 attestation, so the controls we apply in your environment are the ones we are audited against in our own.
A maintained record of what you own, what it runs, when it falls out of support, which licences you hold and when they renew. It belongs to you, and it is the reason a hardware refresh becomes a line in next year budget rather than an unwelcome discovery.
We go through the estate with you on an agreed schedule, using the ticket history and the asset register rather than a presentation, and we bring forward the things that will need budgeting before they turn into something urgent.
Anything in this list that you do not want, we take out and the figure comes down accordingly. The scope is a starting point for a conversation, not a package you have to accept whole.
A monthly figure that quietly absorbed everything would either be very large or would be reopened the first time something substantial happened. These four categories sit outside it, and each is quoted before any work starts.
You buy what you own. We specify it, quote it, and tell you when a device is approaching end of support, but the hardware and licences appear on your invoice at cost plus a margin the agreement states rather than one you have to infer. Folding purchases into the monthly figure would only hide what the equipment costs.
Server replacements, tenant migrations, office moves, structured cabling, a firewall swap, a remediation programme after an assessment. Each is scoped and priced on its own, with the figure agreed before anybody starts. Where a project comes out of something we found rather than something you asked for, we say so plainly.
If a system we recommended retiring is kept in service, or a third-party supplier changes something without telling anyone, the time spent dealing with the consequences is chargeable. In practice this is rare, and the rule we apply is that you hear about it while it is happening rather than when the invoice arrives.
If your scope covers business hours and you need somebody at two in the morning, that is billed at a rate written into the agreement, so you have seen the number long before you are deciding whether to call. Businesses needing cover around the clock take it as scope instead, and we will tell you which is cheaper for your pattern of incidents.
Most of what an agreement changes is procedural rather than technical. Four of those changes are visible to your staff in the first week, which is worth knowing before you announce it internally.
Your people get an address, a telephone number and a portal, and they use them directly. If you are currently the person stopped in the corridor about a printer, that ends in week one. You keep sight of what is happening through reporting rather than by being the queue yourself.
Every ticket, patch, alert and change is logged against your environment. That record is what turns the periodic review into a discussion about what actually happened rather than an exchange of impressions, and it is what you take with you if you ever move to somebody else.
How a new laptop is built, who holds administrative rights, how a leaver is offboarded the same afternoon they leave, how multi-factor authentication is enforced and on what. These stop being settled individually each time. You approve the standard once, and after that it is applied without another conversation.
Because the asset register tracks warranty expiry and end-of-support dates, the equipment you will have to replace next year appears on a list well before it appears as an emergency. For most businesses moving from hourly billing, that predictability turns out to matter more than the support itself.
Hourly support is not a worse product. It is a different arrangement with the incentives pointing the other way, and for some businesses it is still the right one.
| Paying by the hour | A managed agreement | |
|---|---|---|
| What you are buying | Time spent after something has already broken | The estate being kept working, whether or not anything breaks |
| When a fix does not hold | The second visit is billed again | The repeat is ours to absorb, so it is our problem to prevent |
| Preventive work | Has to be proposed, approved and paid for each time | Scheduled, and already inside the fee |
| Budgeting | Varies with how bad the month was | A fixed monthly figure plus projects you agree separately |
| Who holds the knowledge | Whoever attended last, in their own notes | A maintained asset register and documentation you own |
| Where it works better | Few users, a stable estate, a high tolerance for downtime | Once a lost trading day costs more than the monthly figure |
The honest version: if you have eight people, one server that has run untouched for four years and no compliance obligation, hourly may well cost less over a year, and we will say so at the assessment rather than after you have signed. What usually inverts the arithmetic is not the support bill. It is the first day nobody can work.
If you want to test this against your own numbers, add up what you spent on IT labour over the last twelve months, including the invoices that were logged as projects. Most businesses find the total is close to a managed figure already, with the difference being that it arrived unpredictably.
The exit terms deserve more attention than the headline price, because they are the part you rely on if the relationship stops working. Ours are short enough to read in the meeting.
Twelve months is standard. The first quarter is largely spent correcting things that were left behind, and we would rather not do that work twice. Shorter initial terms are available and carry a slightly higher monthly figure; we will quote both if you want to compare them.
It continues month to month with thirty days notice on either side. There is no automatic twelve-month renewal that you have to remember to cancel, and no window during which notice is the only thing you are allowed to give.
We hand over administrative credentials, the documentation, the asset register and the full ticket history, and we co-operate with whoever is taking over. There is no exit fee and no charge for the handover itself. We would rather leave an environment documented than make a point.
Licences and subscriptions bought in your name remain yours. Where something is licensed through us, we tell you before it goes into the environment and we tell you what it would cost to hold directly, so nothing you depend on leaves with us by surprise.
The figure is fixed for the initial term. After that, any change is given sixty days before it takes effect, in writing, with the reason attached. Your user count going up or down is not a price change; it is the count moving, and it is handled on the next invoice.
Escalation runs to a director, and it is a name in the agreement rather than a general mailbox. If that does not resolve it, the notice period applies to us in exactly the way it applies to you, and the standard of work during it does not drop.
Six things that come up while people are reading a draft agreement rather than while they are deciding whether to call.
Yes, and many businesses do. The most common split is everything except one line-of-business application that stays with the vendor who wrote it. What matters is that the boundary is written down, because the part nobody covers is where the arguments happen. Adding scope later changes the fee from the following invoice, not retrospectively.
Somebody with their own account who can raise a ticket. A shared machine with no personal account is counted as a device instead, because it generates a different amount of work. Contractors who need support are users; contractors who only need a guest network password are not. Where a category is ambiguous in your case we settle it before quoting rather than after the first invoice.
No, and we do not meter them. What is bounded is scope, not volume: unlimited support for the things the agreement covers. If a business is raising an unusually high number, that is a signal that something in the environment needs fixing, and the right answer is to fix it rather than to bill for the symptom.
Critical issues carry a 15-minute response target. The remaining response targets are written into the agreement by severity, with the definition of each severity set out beside it, so whether something is urgent is not a matter of opinion on the day. You will see all of them in the document you are signing rather than an average figure on a web page.
Usually not. We will support what is there and tell you in writing what we consider a risk and by when. The exception is something we cannot patch or secure at all, and in that case we will say so during the assessment rather than sign the agreement and raise it in month four.
That is a common and workable arrangement. They keep the work that needs somebody in the building and an understanding of how your business runs; we take monitoring, patching, out-of-hours cover and the escalations one person cannot reasonably carry alone. The division is written into the scope so that neither side assumes the other dealt with something.
If you would rather watch the service run before agreeing a figure, we operate a separate offer of a free first month for a limited number of Canadian businesses. The terms for that are set out on the free first month page.
Tell us roughly what you have and we will tell you what we need to count. The assessment that produces a firm number takes about a week, costs nothing, and does not commit you to anything.
Attendance is by our own engineers rather than a subcontracted network, working from Markham, Toronto, Mississauga, Kitchener, Durham, Montreal and Winnipeg. The SOC 2 Type 2 attestation we hold covers the controls described further up this page.
Five fields. We reply with what we would need to count.
Your details are not passed on.
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