What Managed IT Actually Costs

It’s the partners’ budget meeting for next financial year. Rent is a number. Salaries are a number. Insurance is a number.

Then someone gets to IT, and the room goes a bit quiet. Last year’s total is known. Nobody can say why it was that total, why March was double February, or what next year will look like.

If that’s your meeting, it isn’t your fault. Most of this industry prices IT in a way that makes it hard to plan. So here’s our number, plainly, and then how to read anyone else’s.

So what does managed IT services cost?

At Intuitive IT, managed IT is $260 per person per month, ex GST. The minimum is 10 users, on a 12-month agreement.

For a 30-person firm, that’s $7,800 a month, or $93,600 a year before GST. Add a person and it goes up by $260. Lose one and it comes down. That’s the whole formula.

I’ll admit putting a price on our website felt exposed. Competitors can see it, and so can anyone who thinks it’s high. But a managing partner shouldn’t need three meetings to find out something they needed on day one.

The three ways IT gets priced

Every quote you get will be some version of one of these. Each one tells you something about what the provider is paid to do.

Hourly, or blocks of hours. You pay for time. It looks flexible, and for a five-person office it can be fine. But think about what it rewards. A provider billing by the hour earns more when a problem takes longer, and nothing at all for stopping it happening. That’s not a slight on the people doing the work. It’s the incentive, and incentives tend to win.

Tiered packages. Bronze, silver, gold. Usually a per-user price with different things included at each level. They can be good value, but the tiers are where the surprises live. Security monitoring in the top tier only. Onsite visits counted. After-hours billed separately.

Fixed per-user. One price per person, covering day-to-day support without counting. This is what we do. The provider is paid the same whether your systems break or not, so the only way to make it work is to stop them breaking.

What’s inside our $260

Day-to-day support is unlimited. Your staff can call as often as they need to, remotely or onsite, and nobody’s watching a clock.

The things that turn up as extras elsewhere are in the fee too. A 24/7 Security Operations Centre watches your team’s laptops and their Microsoft 365 sign-ins around the clock. Monthly simulated phishing emails show who’d click. Your Microsoft 365 data is backed up, patching happens in the background, and there’s a strategic business review where someone accountable talks the partners through where your IT is heading, in plain English.

The full list is on our managed IT support page. Check it line by line. You’d do the same with any contract.

What’s on top

You should hear about these from me rather than from an invoice.

Microsoft 365 licences. The licences themselves are on top of the $260. Most firms already pay for them, so it’s usually a line moving from one bill to another rather than a new cost. But when you compare quotes, check whether the other provider’s number includes licences. It changes the comparison a lot.

Onboarding. Moving a firm across takes real work: documenting what you’ve got, setting up monitoring, tidying the accounts nobody has looked at in years. It’s quoted up front, so you know before you sign.

Projects. A migration, a new office, a major upgrade. Anything with a start and an end is quoted before it starts.

Some Mac security licensing, from $12 ex GST per device per month, if your team uses Macs.

Beware: A low per-user price with a long list of exclusions isn’t cheap. It’s the same price, paid later.

The club treasurer’s test

Anyone who’s sat on a sporting club committee knows the treasurer’s favourite question at the start of the season: what will this cost us, all in, by the last game?

Registration is easy. Uniforms are easy. It’s the umpires, the ground hire nobody mentioned, the extra training nights in finals that blow the budget. The fee was never the problem. The bits outside the fee were.

That’s the right question to ask of an IT quote, too. Not “what’s the monthly price” but “what will we have paid, all in, by June”. When you compare what managed IT services cost across providers, that’s the only number that means anything.

Isn’t it cheaper to hire our own IT person?

Sometimes. Do the maths properly, though.

Jobs and Skills Australia’s profile of ICT Managers, using ABS earnings data from May 2025, puts median full-time earnings at $3,310 a week. That’s about $172,000 a year in salary, before super, leave, a laptop, training and recruitment.

Against $93,600 a year for a 30-person firm, one person at the median costs close to twice as much as a whole team with a Security Operations Centre behind it.

You don’t need a manager, of course. A junior support person costs a lot less, and for some firms one good person in the office is the right call, especially alongside an outsourced team rather than instead of one.

But if you’ve got one IT person now and things feel stretched, they’re probably not failing. They’re one person doing four jobs: helpdesk, security, Microsoft 365 and the long-term plan. Nobody’s great at all four, and nobody can watch your systems at 3am and still be sharp at 9.

Tip: Before comparing a salary with a provider’s fee, write down who covers when that person’s on leave. If the answer is “no one”, that’s part of the cost.

Four questions for any quote, including ours

1. What does “unlimited” actually include? Remote and onsite? After hours? Is there a fair-use clause?
2. What’s charged on top, and how? Microsoft 365 licences, onboarding, projects. Fixed quotes or hourly?
3. Is security monitoring in the fee? Plenty of quotes look competitive until the security line goes back in. Ours is included, and our managed cyber security services page sets out what that covers.
4. How long is the agreement, and how do we leave? Twelve months is normal. What matters is what happens to your documentation and passwords on the way out.

There’s more on the last two in six critical questions to ask before signing with an IT company.

One thing to do before your budget meeting

Pull out your last twelve IT invoices, leave out Microsoft licences, and add them up. Divide by your headcount and by twelve. That’s your real cost per person today, extras included.

If it’s below $260 and you’re happy, keep it. If it’s above, or it’s never the same twice, you can see our managed IT pricing in full and put a fixed number in the budget instead.

Where these numbers come from

• Jobs and Skills Australia, Occupation profile: ICT Managers (ANZSCO 1351), median full-time earnings per week, from ABS Survey of Employee Earnings and Hours, May 2025. Annual figure is the weekly median multiplied by 52.
• Intuitive IT pricing: Managed IT Pricing, current at 21 October 2026.

If you’ve already got a quote and you’d like a second opinion, send it to us and we’ll tell you what’s in it and what isn’t, in writing.

Yener