Are we the cheapest managed IT support in London?

It's a fair question and it gets asked on most first calls, usually phrased more politely. The honest answer is more useful than the marketing one, so here it is: no, we are not the cheapest managed IT support in London. And anyone who tells you they are should be asked to prove it. What we can do is put our prices next to what the London market actually charges, show you exactly where we come out ahead and where we don't, and explain the structural reason our rates sit where they do.

What managed IT actually costs in London in 2026

London is its own market. Published pricing guides consistently put it 15–25% above the rest of the UK, which reflects higher salaries and the expectation of same-day on-site attendance. The nationwide picture spans roughly £40 to £150 per user per month; London compresses toward the upper half of that.

Across the 2026 guides published by other UK providers, including CloudSwitched, Connection Technologies and HJS Technology among them, all checked in August 2026. The London bands land like this:

One caveat before you use those numbers: they are ranges from published guides, not quotes. Providers define their tiers differently and plenty won't publish anything at all until you've had a discovery call. That opacity is itself part of why comparing is hard.

What we charge

Our full price list is on the pricing page and always has been. The three managed plans:

All excluding VAT, on a monthly agreement with 30 days' notice and no minimum spend.

Side by side

The entry tier is where the "cheapest" claim falls down. At £50 we're mid-band, and if all you want is someone to answer the phone when a laptop dies, you can find that in London for £40. We're not going to pretend otherwise.

The fully managed tier is where the gap is real. £108 for managed detection and response, compliance reporting and a one-hour response target sits below almost everything else offering the same scope in London, where that band starts at £100 and routinely reaches £175. If you need that level of cover, that's the comparison worth making.

Where we are definitely not the cheapest

Until recently this section was about our £650 per month minimum. It meant a five-person business paid an effective £130 per user. That is above the top of the London basic band, and roughly triple what a £40-per-user provider would charge. We have removed it. There is no minimum spend: five people on Essential now pay £250 a month, which is £50 each, the advertised rate.

That takes the largest asterisk off this page, but it does not make us the cheapest, and the entry tier is still where the claim falls down. Providers advertising £40 per user exist in London. If what you want is somebody to answer the phone when a laptop dies, they will be cheaper than us, and we would rather say so here than after a sales call.

What the change does alter is who this page is worth reading for. A four or five-person firm can now buy a managed plan at the published per-user rate instead of being priced out of one before the conversation starts. If we quoted you the minimum in the past, that is no longer the number.

Why our rates sit below most of the London market

Two reasons, and only one of them is interesting.

The dull one: we're a lean team based in Dagenham, not a central London office. Rent and salaries in RM9 are not rent and salaries in EC2, and that difference has to show up somewhere. It shows up in the rate.

The structural one: nearly every managed IT company runs your monitoring, patching and remote access through a third-party platform, licensed per device or per user, every month. A provider supporting 400 endpoints pays 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 developed and self-hosted by us, and gives managed clients hardware diagnostics, secure remote access for our engineers and live security alerts, without a per-seat licence sitting between us and you.

To be explicit about what that is not: it is not a claim that other providers overcharge. Licensing a mature platform is a sensible decision that buys capabilities building your own doesn't. It's a different cost base, and ours happens to favour the client on price.

The number people forget: the hourly rate

A low monthly fee attached to a high out-of-scope rate is a more expensive product than it looks, and this is where comparisons usually go wrong. Ours, in full:

The no-contract rate is higher on purpose. Unplanned reactive work is the most expensive way to run IT for everyone involved, and pricing it as though it weren't would be dishonest. If you want the cheap number, the plan is the cheap number.

What else gets added on

Nothing here is compulsory, but these are the extras that show up most often, so you can build a realistic total rather than a headline one: Cyber Essentials certification support at £99 per client per month; Cyber Essentials Plus at £1,755 per year; UK GDPR support at £13 per user per month; server management at £162 per server per month; network device management at £34 per device per month; and an NHS DSPT compliance pack at £297 per practice per month. Microsoft 365 licences are resold at list and billed alongside.

How to compare properly

If you're collecting quotes, the monthly per-user figure is the least informative number in the document. Five questions that reveal more:

1. What's actually included at that price? Is patching in it? Backup? Is the helpdesk unlimited or capped at a number of tickets?
2. What's billed extra, and at what hourly rate? Ask for both the on-contract and off-contract figures.
3. Is there a minimum monthly spend? We don't have one. Plenty of providers do and don't lead with it.
4. What's the notice period? Monthly rolling with 30 days is normal. Three-year terms with automatic renewal are a warning sign.
5. Who owns your domain, Microsoft 365 tenant and documentation? If the answer is "your provider", fix that regardless of who you end up with.

Work out your own number

You don't need to speak to anyone for this. The pricing calculator takes your headcount and returns a monthly figure for each tier in about ten seconds. The two-minute IT health check scores your current setup and tells you which tier you'd actually need. Neither asks for an email address.

For the wider picture on how IT support is priced in the capital, our 2026 London pricing guide covers the three charging models and the fees that tend to be buried. If you're weighing a move, what changing provider really costs is the companion piece, and managed IT versus break-fix works out the point where a retainer starts beating hourly billing.

And if the honest answer for your business is that you're already well served, or too small for a retainer to make sense, we'll tell you that too. It's a better outcome than selling you something you resent in six months.