What managed IT costs for a small business.

Nearly all managed IT is billed per user, per month. Twenty employees at $150 each is $3,000 a month, and the bill moves when you hire or when somebody leaves. The meter is headcount.

This service is billed per server or virtual machine. The meter is the infrastructure, because that is what the work is done to. Hiring five people does not change what your file server, your directory, your backups or your firewall need from month to month, so it does not change the fee.

Which meter is cheaper depends entirely on your shape. An office with twenty-five staff and four servers pays far less on the second meter. A five-person office running a dozen virtual machines can pay less on the first.

The phrase covers services that overlap only partly, so the first question about any quote is what is inside it. Four differences account for most of the gap between two numbers.

End-user support. Most per-user pricing includes a help desk your staff can call when a laptop or a password stops working. Mine does not. This service looks after the infrastructure behind your staff, not the people at the desks. If your monthly pain is twenty employees needing someone to call, a per-user provider is the correct purchase and I will say so.

On-site work. Some quotes include visits and travel. The work here is remote, and priced that way.

Hardware and licensing. All-inclusive plans fold laptops, firewalls and software subscriptions into the monthly figure, which moves it substantially. Mine covers labor and documentation. You buy your own equipment, in your own name, and you keep it if the engagement ends.

After-hours response. A price that includes a staffed line at three in the morning is paying for people working shifts. There is no such line here, and the FAQ says so.

Few publish anything. Among Ohio providers who put 2026 figures in public, fully managed per-user service is quoted in the range of roughly $125 to $275 per user per month, and small businesses of five to twenty employees are described as spending somewhere around $1,000 to $3,500 a month in total.

Treat those as the shape of the market rather than as a benchmark. They are what a handful of providers chose to publish, they bundle the four things listed above in different combinations, and none of them is a quote for your environment.

If what keeps going wrong is at the desks, if staff need somebody to call, or if you want one company to own laptops, phones, licensing and servers together, buy per-user managed IT. That is a real service and this is not a cheaper version of it.

If what worries you is the machines the business actually runs on, whether the backups would restore, whether the patching is current, whether the firewall rules still make sense, and whether anyone would notice a failing disk before it took a volume with it, then this is priced for that and nothing else.