01 / Knowledge base
How much does managed IT support cost
6 min read
The price question usually comes up in the first minute, and it is a fair one. The difficulty is that “managed IT” names a contract, not a product — under the same heading one provider sells a phone number to call when the printer stops, and another takes responsibility for the server, the backups and every employee's account.
So rather than a number, it is worth first understanding what is being paid for. Below are the four billing models common on the Polish market, the three factors that genuinely move the price, and the questions that let you compare two offers instead of two figures.
01
Why a serious provider will not quote over the phone
Managed IT is a continuing service and a commitment to respond. Pricing it means estimating risk more than labour: how many tickets will come in, how hard they will be, and what happens if the environment contains something nobody mentioned — a ten-year-old server out of vendor support, backups nobody has ever restored, or an accounting application that runs on exactly one machine in the next room.
A figure given before anyone has looked at the environment therefore either carries a buffer for those surprises or rests on a narrow scope that excludes them. It is usually the second — which is where the disappointment three months in comes from, when the mail migration, the switch replacement and the help with an audit all turn out to be “additional work”.
02
Four billing models, and who carries the risk in each
Almost every offer on the market is a variant of one of four arrangements. They differ less in price than in who carries the risk that there turns out to be more work than anyone assumed.
A monthly flat fee is a fixed amount for a defined scope. The company knows the cost in advance and can budget it, and the provider has an incentive to remove the causes of failures rather than fix them again — every ticket costs them time they have already been paid for. Both sides' interests point the same way here, which is why the flat fee is the default for ongoing care.
An hour pack is a pool bought up front that used time is drawn from. It can be a sensible start with a small team and predictable needs, but it has a built-in flaw: towards the end of the month somebody starts weighing whether a given problem is “worth” reporting. Problems reported late cost more than the hours saved by not reporting them.
An hourly rate with no contract — billing for work actually done — is fair for one-off tasks and poor as a model for ongoing care. Nobody pays the provider to look at the backups in a month when nothing broke, so in that model it usually does not happen.
Per-seat or per-device pricing scales with the company: so much per user, so much per server. It is transparent and easy to recalculate when hiring, on one condition — that the contract defines a “seat” unambiguously. One person with a laptop, a company phone and two accounts can be counted once or four times.
In practice most mature contracts are a hybrid: a flat fee for ongoing care and separate billing for projects — migrations and rollouts. That is a good sign. It means the provider is not pretending a server replacement fits inside a helpdesk subscription.
03
What actually moves the price
The number of users is the most obvious factor and the main variable in any proposal, but on its own it rarely settles the answer. A twenty-person office with laptops, Microsoft 365 and one network can be cheaper to support than an eight-person manufacturer with a server, machine controllers and software whose vendor has left the market.
The second factor is the state you start from. A tidy environment — current software, working backups, accounts whose owners are known — is cheaper to run from the first month. A neglected one has to be caught up first, and an honest provider prices that separately rather than quietly spreading it over twelve instalments.
The third is response time. A shorter response window and wider hours of availability are the cost of readiness itself — somebody has to be available whether or not anything happens. That is why both are priced separately in contracts, and why it is worth agreeing only to the terms the company genuinely needs.
04
What the cheapest quote usually leaves out
Two quotes can differ a great deal and both be honest, because they describe different services. Before comparing the amounts, it is worth checking whether the same things sit on both sides.
- Backup oversight — somebody who checks that the backup ran and that data can actually be restored from it. That is not the same as “we have backups”.
- Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace administration: creating and removing accounts, permissions and security configuration — not only password resets.
- On-site visits, and whether they are included or billed separately along with travel.
- Onboarding a new employee: whether preparing the computer, the accounts and the access sits inside the scope, or is billed separately for every new hire.
- Documentation of the environment that stays with the client. Without it, changing provider starts with rediscovering your own company.
- A response time written into the contract, split by severity level. “We respond quickly” is not a commitment.
05
What to ask before you compare two figures
A good provider answers all of these without opening a price list, because they are questions about how the work is done, not about the rate.
- What exactly is out of scope and billed separately?
- What is the response time for an urgent request and for a standard one — and is it in the contract?
- Who will know our environment, and what happens when that person is unavailable?
- Do we get documentation and administrative access to our own systems?
- What does termination look like, and handing the environment over to somebody else?
- What changes in the price if we hire five more people?
The last two matter most and are asked least. A figure that does not say what happens when five more people join, or what leaving looks like, is not yet a quote.
06
How we price it
We work on a flat fee at three levels of scope — IT Essential, IT Business and IT Critical — and price rollouts and migrations separately, because those are projects rather than ongoing care. The figure comes after a review of the environment, not before it.
Response times are written into the contract: a standard ticket within three working days, an urgent one within twelve hours. That is the current contractual baseline; the IT Business and IT Critical plans get shorter, individually agreed windows written into the SLA. We publish those numbers because they are commitments — and we do not publish a price list, because without knowing the environment it would be a guess.