I got a call last year from a business owner in Laval — 14 employees, a mix of remote and in-office — who had just spent $8,400 on emergency IT fixes over three months. Three separate incidents. Three separate invoices. No heads-up, no plan, no one watching the network. When we finally sat down to talk about outsourced IT cost, his first question was: "Why didn't I do this sooner?"
The honest answer is that pricing in this industry isn't always easy to find. Most IT companies — ours included — don't post a rate card on their website. That probably feels suspicious. So let me explain the logic behind it, and more importantly, help you figure out what you should actually expect to pay.
The most common model you'll encounter is called per-user, per-month pricing. You pay a flat monthly fee based on how many employees you have, and that fee covers a defined set of services — help desk support, monitoring, security tools, and so on. It's predictable. You can budget for it the same way you budget for rent or payroll software.
This is different from what's sometimes called "break-fix" support, where you call someone when something breaks and pay by the hour. Break-fix isn't inherently bad, but it has a nasty habit of sending you a surprise invoice right after something goes wrong — which is usually the worst possible time to also absorb an unexpected IT bill.
A few things determine where your monthly cost lands:
One thing worth knowing: a lower per-user price doesn't always mean a better deal. If the cheaper option doesn't include endpoint security, backup monitoring, or after-hours response, you'll likely end up paying for those things separately — or absorbing the cost of an incident that could have been prevented.
I'll be straight with you. Every business is different. A 10-person accounting firm has different IT needs than a 10-person wholesale distributor. One might have a compliance requirement we need to account for; the other might be running legacy inventory software that needs special handling. Slapping a number on our website and calling it a day wouldn't be honest — it would just be a number that may or may not apply to you.
But here's what I can tell you: the per-user, per-month model is designed specifically to make outsourced IT cost predictable. No more mystery invoices. No "that call fell outside our scope" surprises. When you know exactly what you're getting and what it costs, you can actually plan around it.
According to Spiceworks Ziff Davis's 2025 State of IT report, 62% of SMBs increased their IT budgets last year — the highest net-increase ratio since 2021. The businesses driving that trend aren't spending more because they love spending. They're investing because they've learned — sometimes the hard way — that reactive IT costs more than…
Without getting into numbers that won't apply to your situation, here's a framework that's useful for planning conversations.
At this size, you're typically looking for someone to handle the day-to-day — computers that work, an email environment that doesn't cause headaches, someone to call when something goes sideways. The focus is on reliability and response time. You probably don't need a full security operations centre, but you do need someone who's watching your environment and not just showing up after the damage is done.
Here's where it gets more interesting. At this scale, IT failures start having real operational impact. If your server goes down or your team gets hit with ransomware, you can lose hours — or days — of productivity. And honestly, the recovery costs from a single serious incident can easily exceed what a full year of proactive outsourced IT would cost. This is also the range where security tooling, backup strategy, and employee security awareness training become non-negotiable.
Industry-wide, per-user, per-month pricing for managed IT services typically ranges from roughly $100 to $300+ per user, depending on what's included. That's a wide range — intentionally so. A basic support-desk-only plan sits at the low end. A fully managed package with 24/7 NOC monitoring, endpoint detection, backup management, and security tools sits higher. The right comparison isn't the cheapest option versus the most expensive. It's what each option actually covers.
This is where proposals can get muddy, so pay attention to what's in and what's out when you're comparing options.
And one thing that surprises people: new employee onboarding and offboarding is sometimes a separate line item. If you hire a lot, that's worth clarifying before you sign anything.
This is the framing I keep coming back to. Most business owners think about outsourced IT as a cost. And it is — but it's a cost that replaces a much less predictable one.
Downtime is expensive. A ransomware attack is expensive. A data breach is expensive. The owner in Laval I mentioned earlier? His $8,400 in reactive IT spend didn't include the hours his team lost waiting for things to get fixed, or the stress of not knowing whether the next call would bring another invoice. That's a real cost too — it's just the kind that doesn't show up on a line item.
But the math isn't complicated: if your team loses even a few hours of productivity per month to IT issues that proactive support would have caught, the hourly value of that lost time adds up fast. For most SMBs we talk to, the monthly cost of outsourced IT pays for itself before the quarter is out.
We offer a free IT evaluation — no pressure, no obligation. We take a look at your current setup, identify any gaps, and give you a clear picture of what a tailored outsourced IT arrangement would cover and cost. Book a time that works for you at montrealitservices.com.
