Per user, per hour, flat fee, monthly plan: the labels sound interchangeable and behave nothing alike. This is what each model really measures, and the questions that stop the first invoice being a surprise.
Small business IT support is priced in a handful of recurring shapes: per user or per device, per hour or in prepaid blocks, a flat monthly fee, or per project. None of them is a trick and none of them is universally right. Each one measures something different, and each one quietly shapes how you and the provider behave.
This page explains the models without attaching figures, because we do not publish prices anywhere on this site. What moves the number inside whichever model you choose is a separate question, answered in what IT support costs.
You pay for each person covered, whatever mix of laptop, phone and accounts they carry. It is the most common model for managed support because it scales with the thing a business actually thinks in: headcount. Hiring someone has a known support cost attached; someone leaving should reduce the bill, and checking that it actually does is a surprisingly good test of your provider's attention. The soft spot is the counting rule: shared mailboxes, service accounts and part-timers all need a written answer before the first invoice, not after.
The same idea measured in hardware. It fits businesses where devices are shared or outnumber people: shop floors, warehouses, clinics, anywhere a workstation belongs to a shift rather than a person. In a one-laptop-per-person office it is just the per user model with more counting.
You pay when something breaks, for the time it takes. Honest for genuinely occasional needs, and you pay nothing in a quiet month. The behavioural cost is real though: hourly billing quietly discourages the early, small call, and IT problems are cheapest exactly when they are small. Nobody is paid to prevent anything under this model, only to repair it.
Prepaid bundles of hourly time, usually at a better effective rate. A sensible middle ground for the business that needs help several times a year but not every week. Ask two questions before buying one: do the hours expire, and what happens when the block runs dry in the middle of a problem.
One figure, agreed scope, everything inside it covered. This is what "fixed price IT support" and "monthly IT support plan" usually mean in practice. Predictable for you, and it puts the incentive where you want it: under a flat fee, prevention is the provider's profit margin, so things being set up properly is suddenly in both your interests. The entire model lives or dies on scope. A flat fee with a vague scope is not fixed pricing, it is a recurring argument with a direct debit attached.
A defined job at a quoted price: a migration, a rebuild, a cleanup. The right model for work with a beginning and an end, and the wrong one for ongoing cover, because the day after the project closes, nobody is responsible for anything. Most businesses end up pairing it with one of the models above rather than choosing between them.
Every one of these has a short, checkable answer. A provider who will not give one is answering a different way.
We support small businesses on the ordinary things: computers, email, accounts, domains, the website, and the systems around them. Which model that should be sold under depends on your situation, and we will tell you honestly, including when the answer is a model with a smaller bill.
Because a price list for IT support is a list of answers to a question nobody has asked yet. The honest inputs, how many people, what state the setup is in, how fast you need answers, what is in scope, change the number so much that a published figure is either padded to cover the worst case or a teaser that will not survive contact with your actual situation.
We do not publish figures anywhere on this site for exactly that reason. What we can publish is how each model works, which is what this page is, and what moves the number, which is the what IT support costs guide.
Neither is better; they measure different things and suit different businesses. Per user fits when each person carries a predictable bundle of technology. Per device fits when the devices outnumber the people or do not belong to anyone in particular: shared workstations, a shop floor machine, meeting room kit.
What matters is that the counting rule matches your reality. A per user price in a business full of shared devices leaves half the estate uncovered or argued about, and a per device price in a laptop-only office just makes the same number harder to predict.
Ask, because providers genuinely differ. Sometimes it is every human. Sometimes every account, which matters once you notice that shared mailboxes, service accounts and that one login the old system uses are all accounts. Sometimes it is only people who can raise a ticket.
The gap between those definitions is where the surprise on the first invoice comes from. It is also why two quotes that look far apart are sometimes the same quote with different counting rules.
They sit between hourly and monthly, and they inherit a bit of both. You get a better effective rate than ad hoc hourly and some budgeting certainty, without committing to a monthly arrangement. That is genuinely useful for a business with occasional but real needs.
The two things to check before buying one: whether the hours expire, and what happens when the block runs out mid-problem. A block that quietly evaporates at year end was a donation, not a plan.
Yes, and mature arrangements usually do. A common shape: a monthly agreement covering the routine, with project work quoted separately per job. That separation is healthy, because it stops big one-off jobs being smuggled into the monthly fee, and it stops the monthly fee being inflated to cover jobs that may never happen.
The thing to keep in writing is the boundary: what the monthly covers, and what triggers a separate quote. Most billing disputes in IT support are two people with different memories of that line.
How support is priced, and which model actually suits your size.
The levers that lower the bill honestly, and the false savings that do not.
Straight advice on the systems your business runs on.
Untangle the accounts, domains and logins nobody has a full list of.
Ongoing website care and support options.
Tell us what you need and we will map out the simplest path.
Tell us how many people you are, what you run on, and how often things go wrong. You get a straight recommendation, including if it is a model we do not offer.