Managed IT vs break-fix: which is actually cheaper?

It is the first real question anyone asks when they start looking at IT support: do we pay a fixed monthly fee, or just call someone when something breaks? Most articles on this answer it by asserting that managed IT is always better, which is not true and is easy to see through. Here is the honest version, with our actual published rates in it.

The two models, plainly

Break-fix is what most small businesses start with. Something stops working, you call someone, they fix it, you get an invoice for the time. No commitment, no monthly cost, and no relationship until the next problem.

Managed IT is a fixed monthly fee per person. Your systems are monitored around the clock, updates are applied on a schedule, and support is included rather than billed. The provider carries the risk of a bad month instead of profiting from it.

The incentive problem nobody mentions

The strongest argument against break-fix is not price. It is that your IT company only earns money when your systems fail.

Nobody is suggesting your provider sabotages anything. But over years, break-fix quietly rewards the wrong things: no reason to spend unbilled time preventing the fault that pays for next month, no reason to document your environment, and every reason to fix the symptom in front of them rather than the cause behind it. Managed IT inverts that. A provider on a fixed fee loses money every time something breaks, which makes stability the commercial interest of both parties.

The numbers, using our real rates

Take a business with 12 staff. On our Professional tier that is £924 a month, or £11,088 a year excluding VAT.

Break-fix at our no-contract rate of £126 an hour reaches that same £11,088 at about 88 hours a year. Roughly seven and a half hours a month.

So the honest breakpoint is this: if your business genuinely uses less than about seven hours of IT help a month, break-fix costs less on the invoice. That is a real threshold and plenty of very small businesses sit under it.

What the comparison leaves out

That calculation compares hours to hours, which is the comparison that flatters break-fix. It quietly ignores everything the monthly fee includes that hourly work does not:

• 24/7 monitoring. Problems raised as alerts before anyone in your team notices.
• Automated patching. The single most effective defence against automated attacks.
• Managed backup with tested restores (Professional and above). Not a backup job nobody has ever restored from.
• EDR and email security. The controls that actually stop the two most common attack routes.
• Phishing training. Cheapest control available, consistently the most effective.
• An asset register and documentation. So you are never dependent on one person's memory.

Buying those separately on an hourly basis is possible in principle. In practice nobody does, because there is no invoice trigger. Nothing breaks, so nobody calls, so it never happens.

The month that decides it

Most businesses do not switch because of the arithmetic. They switch after a month where a server died with a backup that turned out not to work, or a mailbox was compromised and nobody noticed for a fortnight. The bill for that month is rarely the hourly rate. It is the days of lost work behind it.

That is the genuine argument for a fixed fee: not that it is always cheaper, but that it removes the tail risk, and the tail is where the real money is.

When break-fix is genuinely the right answer

We would rather say this than pretend otherwise. Break-fix makes sense if you have fewer than about five people, your work does not stop when a computer does, you hold nothing sensitive, and you can accept being down for a day or two. Under those conditions a monthly fee is buying insurance against a risk you do not really carry.

We have no minimum monthly spend, so a managed plan is open to you at any headcount. A four-person team pays for four users rather than meeting a floor. That does not change the paragraph above, though. If the conditions in it describe your business, we will still suggest a one-off audit and a fixed piece of work instead of a retainer. That is a better fit and we would rather tell you than sell you.

Working out where you sit

Two things worth doing before you decide. Add up what you actually spent on IT help over the last twelve months, including the days people could not work. Then run our free two-minute IT health check. It will tell you whether the fundamentals are covered, which is usually the more important question.

Our full rate card is on the pricing page, including the calculator, and what's included is set out tier by tier.