Ask three providers to quote managed IT for the same ten-person office and you'll get three numbers that appear to price three different businesses. One says $1,200 a month, one says $3,000, and one won't name a figure until you've sat through a discovery call. Nobody is necessarily cheating you — the quotes cover different amounts of work, and the industry is in no hurry to make them comparable.
Here are the real ranges, what sits behind them, and how to tell a fair price from a cheap one that costs more.
The going rate, per user, per month
Most managed service providers — MSPs, in the trade — price per user: one monthly fee that covers a person's laptop, desktop, phone, accounts and help-desk time. Published US pricing guides put fully managed support at roughly $100–$250 per user per month as of September 2026, with most small businesses landing between $100 and $200. Plans that add compliance work and 24/7 security monitoring commonly run $200–$300 and up.
A ten-person office on a standard plan should therefore expect a bill between about $1,000 and $2,000 a month. When a quote lands far outside that band in either direction, the interesting question is why.
Per user, per device or all-in: the three models
- Per user — the dominant model now, because most people carry two or three devices. Everything one person uses sits under one fee, and headcount is a number you already track, which makes budgeting simple.
- Per device — a fee for each machine instead. As of September 2026, published rates commonly run $30–$100 a month for a workstation and $200–$500 a month for a server. This model suits shops where devices outnumber people or several people share one terminal — retail counters, warehouses, front desks.
- All-inclusive flat fee — one number for the whole office. Fine when the contract lists exactly what it covers; risky when it doesn't, because "everything" has a way of shrinking after signature.
What's included — and what never is
A standard agreement covers the day-to-day: help desk, remote monitoring, patching, endpoint protection, backup monitoring, and dealing with your other vendors when the printer company blames the network company.
Four things are almost always billed on top, and quotes that hide them are how a $150-per-user contract becomes a $250-per-user reality:
- Onboarding. Someone has to document your network, install the management tools and clean up whatever the last arrangement left behind. It's a one-time charge — get it in writing before you sign, because it isn't small.
- Projects. Office moves, server replacements, email migrations and network builds are scoped and quoted separately from the monthly fee.
- Hardware. The monthly fee maintains your machines; it does not replace them. Refresh cycles stay on your budget, though a good provider will plan them with you.
- Software licenses. Microsoft 365, accounting packages, security tools above the base tier — billed at cost or with a markup, but billed.
What actually moves the price
- Compliance. HIPAA for anything medical, PCI for anything taking cards, CMMC for defense work. Regulated offices need documentation, auditing and extra tooling, and they sit at the top of every range.
- Servers. An office that runs entirely in the cloud is cheaper to support than one with a server closet — each on-premise server adds real monthly cost, as the per-device rates above show.
- Response time. A contract guaranteeing a 15-minute response costs more than one promising next business day, because someone has to be sitting there. Decide what an hour of downtime actually costs you before paying for speed you don't need.
- Hours of coverage. Weekday business hours is the base price. Evenings, weekends and holidays are staffing, and staffing is money.
- Security depth. A base plan includes endpoint protection. Serious plans cover most of the small-business cybersecurity checklist — and every item on it is somebody's labor.
The too-cheap warning signs
An MSP charging half the going rate has found a way to deliver half the service; it just isn't printed in the brochure. The usual hiding places:
- "Monitoring included" — meaning they'll watch things break, then bill hourly to fix them.
- Unlimited support with a fair-use clause that makes it limited.
- No security tooling in the base price, sold back to you later as add-ons.
- No response time named anywhere in the contract.
- A long term with an early-exit fee — priced low because leaving is expensive.
Break-fix versus managed: the honest math
The alternative is paying by the hour when something breaks. Published break-fix rates mostly fall between $100 and $250 an hour as of September 2026, with after-hours and emergency work above that.
Run the numbers for your own office. A ten-person company at $150 per user pays $18,000 a year for managed service. At $150 an hour, that same money buys 120 hours of break-fix — ten hours of repairs a month, every month. If you're five people, fully in the cloud, with no server and no compliance obligations, you may not use anything close to that, and paying per problem is genuinely the better deal. If your needs really are occasional, posting each job free on Koadi and taking bids from vetted technicians usually undercuts both models. The full comparison is in managed IT versus on-demand support.
Managed service earns its fee when downtime costs real money, when you're regulated, or when the office is big enough that something is always broken somewhere. It's maintenance plus insurance; break-fix is neither — nobody on break-fix is patching your machines on a quiet Tuesday.
Questions to ask any provider
Take these into every sales call. The answers separate providers quickly.
- What exactly is in the monthly fee, line by line — and what hourly rate applies to everything that isn't?
- What response time is guaranteed in the contract, not the pitch deck?
- What does onboarding cost — and if we leave, who holds our passwords and documentation?
- Are projects quoted separately, and at what rate?
- Which security tools are in the base price, and which are add-ons?
- What is the contract term, and what does exiting early cost?
A good provider answers all six without flinching. A provider who goes vague at question three is telling you something too.
Getting a number for your own office
Koadi delivers managed IT — ongoing support for a whole office, remote and on-site — scoped to the office you actually have rather than read off a tier sheet, then supported afterwards. And when what you have is one problem rather than an ongoing need, the marketplace covers that: post the problem free, set a fixed price or take bids from vetted, identity-verified technicians, and the money sits in escrow until you approve the fix. Remote help covers every US state, evenings and weekends included; on-site visits come through local vetted techs. Call (848) 266-6363 or email help@koaditech.com and describe your office — the quote will match it.