Paying by the hour is cheaper in a quiet month and expensive in a bad one, because you are buying repairs while nobody is paid to prevent them. A fixed monthly fee costs the same every month and pays somebody to watch the machines, install the updates and test the backups, so less reaches you in the first place. Add up last year’s invoices and the hours your staff lost waiting, and you will know which side your business sits on.
Hourly work is a repair after the fact. Something stops, you call, you go into a queue, somebody arrives or dials in, and you are billed for the time it took. The person doing the work is competent and the invoice is honest. What the arrangement never pays for is the hour spent making sure the same thing does not happen again next quarter.
A monthly fee pays for the quiet work. Updates installed on a schedule. Disks and backups watched, so a failing drive is replaced before it takes a week of files with it. Two-step logins in place before somebody guesses a password. And a person who already knows how your office is wired, so you skip the twenty minutes of explaining it.
The bill from an hourly provider shows their time. It does not show your staff standing at their desks while the queue moves, or the front desk telling patients the system is down, or the third visit for a fault that was always going to come back. Those hours are real money and they land on your payroll instead of theirs.
There is also the re-explaining. Each new technician starts by asking where the server is, which supplier the internet line is with, and what the password for the router is. On an hourly arrangement, you pay for that conversation every time.
A very small office that runs entirely on cloud email and cloud files, with four laptops and no server, can genuinely be fine calling somebody twice a year. A one-off job with clear edges — a move, a website rebuild, a switch to a new customer system — is better bought as a project at a fixed price than folded into a monthly fee.
A business that already has its own IT person often wants hands rather than a plan. That works too, and we say so when it is the honest answer for the business in front of us.
Pull last year’s IT invoices and add them up. Then add the hours your staff spent unable to work, at what an hour of your payroll actually costs. Then count how many times the same fault came back. Put that total beside the published monthly price for your headcount and the comparison stops being a matter of opinion.
One more figure belongs in it. Ask yourself what a week without your files would do to the business, and whether anyone can currently prove that week is impossible.
Small Office Support sits between the two at $1,900 a month for offices of 5 to 15 people. It covers the computers, the email, the files and the daily backup, with the same callback promise, and it exists because plenty of offices need the quiet work without needing the whole department.
Before quoting anybody a monthly fee, we do this.
Every plan runs month to month with 30 days notice, so a monthly fee never becomes a trap you have to argue your way out of.
Leave your name and your number. A person calls you back the same business day, usually within an hour, asks what you spent last year and what keeps breaking, and tells you honestly which arrangement costs you less.