Changing IT firm: what it really costs

Most businesses that are unhappy with their IT provider stay put for the same reason: not loyalty, but the suspicion that changing will be expensive and disruptive. It's a fair worry, and it deserves a straight answer rather than reassurance. So here's what changing IT firm actually costs. Including the ones that are real, the ones that aren't, and one structural reason our monthly rates sit where they do.

The bill you can see, and the one you can't

When people compare IT providers they compare monthly fees. That's the visible number, and it's the easiest to put in a spreadsheet.

The invisible number is what your current arrangement costs you in the months when things go wrong: the morning nobody could get into email, the laptop that took four days to replace because no one had a spare image, the invoice for out-of-hours work that arrived after a weekend nobody planned for. Those don't appear on any comparison because they're not billed as IT. They're billed as a bad week.

Before you compare anyone's rates, it's worth adding up what the last twelve months genuinely cost you, including the days people couldn't work. That number is usually the one that decides it.

What switching genuinely costs

Being honest, there are three real costs, and only one of them is usually significant.

• Your time. A handover needs someone on your side who can answer questions and approve changes. Realistically a few hours spread over a few weeks. This is unavoidable and everyone underestimates it.
• Genuine remediation. If an audit finds an unsupported server or software that's past its life, replacing it is a real cost. It's also a cost you already had. The audit just made it visible. Anything like this should be quoted separately and up front, before you commit to it.
• Overlap. If your current provider is on a notice period, you may pay both for a short window. Worth checking your notice terms before you start rather than after.

What it shouldn't cost

Onboarding itself, meaning auditing your environment, documenting it, transferring accounts and getting monitoring in place, is part of taking a client on. If a provider wants to bill you separately for the privilege of becoming their customer, that tells you something about how the relationship will go.

You also shouldn't have to buy your own documentation. The asset register and network documentation produced during onboarding should be yours outright, whatever happens afterwards. We hand ours over as a matter of course, partly because it's right and partly because a client who can leave easily is a client we have to keep earning.

Why our monthly rate is lower: the actual mechanism

This is the part most providers won't explain, so here it is plainly.

Nearly every managed IT company runs your monitoring, patching and remote access through a third-party platform, an RMM in the jargon. Those platforms are licensed per device or per user, every month. If a provider supports 400 endpoints, they're paying a licence on all 400, and that cost has to live somewhere. It lives in your monthly fee.

We built our own instead. Alpha IT Client Management is our own platform, developed and self-hosted by us, giving every managed client hardware diagnostics across their devices, secure remote access for our engineers, and security alerts as they happen. It does the job the licensed products do, without a per-seat licence sitting between us and you.

That's not the only reason our rates are what they are, because we're a lean local team in Dagenham rather than a central London office, but it's the structural one, and it's the one that doesn't disappear as we grow. It's why we can publish £50, £77 and £108 per user per month openly when most local firms won't publish anything at all.

To be clear about what this isn't: it isn't a claim that other providers are overcharging. Licensing a mature platform is a perfectly sensible decision and it buys them things building your own doesn't. It's simply a different cost structure, and ours happens to favour the client on price.

What to actually compare

If you're weighing up providers, the headline rate is the least useful number available. Compare these instead:

1. What's included at that price? Is monitoring in it? Patching? Backup? Is the helpdesk unlimited or capped? Our tiers are itemised on the managed IT page.
2. What's charged extra, and at what rate? Ours is £86 an hour for contract clients against £126 without an agreement. Ask for both numbers. A low monthly fee with a high out-of-scope rate is a different product to what it looks like.
3. Who owns your domain, your Microsoft 365 tenant and your documentation? If the answer is "our provider", fix that regardless of whether you move.
4. What happens out of hours? Included, chargeable, or not available? At what rate?
5. What's the notice period? Monthly rolling and 30 days is normal. Three-year terms with automatic renewal are a warning sign.

Work out your own number first

You don't need to speak to anyone to get most of the way here. Our pricing calculator gives you a monthly figure for your headcount in about ten seconds, and the two-minute IT health check tells you where your current setup actually stands. Both without an email address.

If the answer is that you're already well served, that's genuinely a good outcome. If it isn't, the handover process is set out step by step here, including what we check before anything moves.