In short
- Once you pass about ten staff and your work stops when the computers stop, a monthly agreement usually costs less across a year than paying by the emergency.
- The two ways of buying pay the provider in opposite directions. Per call, they earn more when your equipment fails. Monthly, they earn more when it does not.
- Under ten staff, with everything in the cloud and no sensitive records, paying per call is a sensible way to buy.
Most owners meet this question on a bad day. A server stops on a Tuesday afternoon. Nobody can open the files. You phone whoever you used last time, pay the after-hours rate, and hope it holds.
This guide lays out the two ways of buying IT help, what each one really costs across a year, and the questions worth asking before you sign anything.
It is written for an owner rather than a technician. You need no technical knowledge to use it, and by the end you will have a number you can put beside the quote in your hand. If the only question you came with is the price, the short version is on our pricing page and the arithmetic behind it is in what IT support costs in Canada.
Paying per call
Something stops working. You phone someone. They come, they fix it, you pay for the hours and the parts. They leave.
That has real advantages. There is no monthly fee and no commitment. For a one-person business with two laptops and everything in the cloud, it is a sensible way to buy.
The trouble starts as you grow. A firm of 15 to 50 people usually runs a file server, a phone system, a few network switches, a firewall, cloud accounts tied to office logins, and a mix of Windows and Mac machines. When one piece of that fails, several other things fail with it. The failure also tends to land at 4:45 on the Friday of a long weekend, when after-hours rates start around $200 an hour.
Paying monthly
A monthly agreement means one company takes ongoing responsibility for your computers for a set fee. In practice that covers:
- Watching your machines and servers so problems get caught before they stop the office
- Applying security updates on a schedule instead of whenever someone remembers
- A help desk your staff can reach without hunting for a mobile number
- Antivirus, email filtering and regular security checks
- Backups that run automatically and get tested
- A quarterly sit-down about what needs replacing and what it will cost
The two models pay the provider in opposite ways. Paying per call, they earn more when your equipment fails. Paying monthly, they earn more when it does not. That is the whole argument in one sentence.
Our own monthly plans and what sits inside each one are published on the pricing page, and the day-to-day work is described on managed IT.
What a year actually costs
Take a 25-person office in the Greater Toronto Area. Paying per call, a normal year looks roughly like this:
- Eight to twelve ordinary support visits: $6,000 to $12,000
- Two to four after-hours emergencies: $3,000 to $8,000
- Unplanned hardware replacement: $2,000 to $5,000
- Staff time lost while systems are down: $3,000 to $6,000
- Cleaning up one security incident, spread across three years: $2,000 to $5,000
That lands somewhere between $16,000 and $36,000, and you cannot predict which month it arrives in. Those are Greater Toronto Area figures; what we cover in the city and how visits work is on the Toronto page.
A monthly agreement for the same office lands in a similar range, and three things move the comparison:
Lost staff time is bigger than it looks. When 25 people lose two hours, you lose their output, the momentum of the day, and the work that gets pushed into the following week. One serious outage in a professional office can cost several thousand dollars in wages alone.
Problems reach you late when you pay per call. You hear about them once they have already stopped the office. Watched systems warn you while the disk is still failing, which is a Tuesday inconvenience instead of a Friday crisis.
Security is left to chance. A Canadian business hit by ransomware has to notify the people whose information was exposed, and often the Privacy Commissioner. Recovery is expensive and slow, and the letters you have to send are worse. Pay-per-call work rarely includes anybody minding that.
The privacy side, which matters more in Canada
Canadian businesses carry privacy duties that many owners never see written down.
PIPEDA covers most private companies. It says you have to protect personal information with safeguards that suit how sensitive it is, and it says you have to tell people, and the Privacy Commissioner, when a breach puts them at real risk.
PHIPA covers health information in Ontario, which includes medical, dental and physiotherapy clinics. The rules are stricter: documented policies, logging, and mandatory breach notice. We cover what that means for a practice on the clinics page.
Alberta’s PIPA and Quebec’s Law 25 add their own rules on top. Quebec’s are the strictest in North America.
When you pay per call, nobody is minding any of this. Patient records end up on somebody’s personal Dropbox because it was convenient. A machine runs software that stopped getting security fixes two years ago. A staff member left in March and their login still works in October.
What to ask before you sign
- What do you watch, and can I see a sample report? A serious provider can show you exactly what they see on your equipment.
- What happens after hours? Ask whether a person picks up or an alert goes to a voicemail box.
- How often do your technicians leave? High turnover means a new stranger learning your office every few months.
- Walk me through the first 30 days. The documentation done at the start is what makes everything afterwards fast. A provider who wants to skip it is telling you something.
- How do I leave? Month-to-month terms and your own documentation handed back to you. If leaving costs a year of fees, that is your answer.
When paying per call still makes sense
- Fewer than five staff, everything in the cloud, no sensitive customer records
- You already employ someone who handles the daily work and only needs a specialist now and then
- A small second location that hangs off a properly managed head office
How to decide
If you have more than ten staff, hold customer information, and your day stops when the computers stop, a monthly agreement is the cheaper and calmer choice. Paying per call keeps the monthly number low and moves the cost into unpredictable, expensive weeks.
Two short answers sit beside this decision: how much does IT support cost and managed IT against paying by the hour.
Talk to a person about this
Leave your name and number on the contact page and a real person calls you back the same business day, usually within an hour. You can also book the free infrastructure audit and get a written picture of where you stand before you decide anything.
itopsi is a managed IT provider working with Canadian businesses from a Toronto base. Coverage, terms and monthly pricing are published on the site.
