The honest answer is that managed IT should cost roughly what it takes to properly support your people, secure your environment, manage your devices, back up your data, and keep the business running. That sounds like a dodge, but it is the whole point: the price is driven by your environment, not by a percentage of your revenue and not by whichever monthly number looks smallest on a quote. Two businesses with the same headcount can need very different things, and the price should reflect that.
Start with the environment, not a slice of revenue
A lot of pricing advice online tells owners to spend some fixed percentage of revenue on IT. I do not use that, because revenue does not tell me what I actually have to support. A 20-person law firm, a contractor, a nonprofit, and an accounting firm can all pull similar revenue and still have completely different IT needs: different software, different compliance pressure, different tolerance for downtime.
I price off the things that actually create work: users, workstations, servers, locations, and overall complexity. Those are the levers. When an owner asks me point-blank what this should cost, I give a per-user and per-device range and then explain what moves it up or down. If a provider can quote you without asking about any of that, they are guessing.
The monthly number is the wrong thing to compare
The most common mistake I see owners make while shopping is comparing the monthly price without comparing what is inside it. One provider's number might include help desk, monitoring, endpoint security, Microsoft 365 management, backups, documentation, vendor coordination, and actual planning. Another's might be basic support and not much else. On paper both say “IT support.” They are not the same product.
This is where the cheaper quote wins the meeting and loses the year. Projects, security work, after-hours coverage, new-employee onboarding, real planning — if those are not in the scope, they become surprise line items later, or they simply never happen. Before you compare two numbers, make both providers show you everything a managed plan is supposed to include. Compare the scope first; then the price means something.
What the cheap quote quietly leaves out
To hit a low headline number, something has to give, and it is almost always the work you do not see day to day: documentation, backup testing, security hardening, proactive maintenance, lifecycle planning, and following a ticket through to the actual root cause instead of just closing it.
You will still get someone answering the phone, so for a while it feels fine. The bill comes due later: nobody has the firewall password, the backup has never once been test-restored, five-year-old computers are everywhere, Microsoft 365 is wide open with no security baseline, and the same problem keeps coming back because no one ever fixed why it happens. None of that shows up in month one. All of it shows up eventually.
When a price is too low to be real
Yes, there is a floor. If someone is quoting true managed IT at $50 or $75 per user per month, I would be cautious. At that number it is hard to fit real support, monitoring, security tooling, Microsoft 365 management, backup oversight, documentation, and proactive work without quietly dropping something that matters.
It might be a perfectly fine price for basic break/fix — someone to call when a machine dies. Just do not assume it is full managed IT. The question to ask is not “why is this so cheap.” It is “what is not being done at this price?” Make them answer it specifically.
Simple pricing that still matches reality
I am a fan of simple pricing. Flat per-user pricing is easy for an owner to understand, and that is genuinely valuable — you should not need a spreadsheet to make sense of your own IT bill. But simple cannot mean pretending every business is identical.
Two companies with the same user count can be worlds apart. One has a single office, cloud apps, and newer machines. The other has on-prem servers, multiple locations, compliance requirements, remote staff, aging hardware, and one complicated line-of-business application that everything depends on. A price that ignores that is not simple — it is just wrong for one of them.
What I prefer is a simple base model with clear, visible adjustments for servers, workstations, locations, and complexity. You should be able to understand the quote at a glance and still trust that it matches what you actually run.
The bottom line
A good IT price is not the lowest one and it is not a percentage of your revenue. It is the number that honestly covers supporting, securing, and maintaining your specific environment — with a scope you can see and a provider who can explain it. If you want a straight, no-pressure sense of where your setup lands, you can run the numbers for your setup and we will walk through what is driving them.
