Break fix and a monthly contract are not two prices for the same service. They are two different bets about who carries the cost of something going wrong. Under break fix you buy hours after a failure. Under a contract you pay a flat amount per seat every month whether anything fails or not. The record behind this site read 29 IT providers on 10 September 2026: 7 publish a per-seat figure, the median is $99.50 a user a month, and not one of the 29 publishes an hourly break fix rate, which says plainly which of the two models the trade wants to sell.
Managed IT services vs break fix: the incentive argument runs in both directions
This is the only honest way to compare the models. Under break fix the provider is paid for the hours a failure creates, so its revenue rises when more breaks, and nobody is paid to stop the thing happening again. Under a contract it is paid the same whatever happens, so an afternoon spent preventing a repeat is money it keeps. That is the real case for the managed model. The inversion is that a flat fee also rewards doing the minimum: the cheapest month is the one where nothing is touched, and a provider losing money on an underpriced seat rate will not go looking for work. Neither model is automatically better, so what decides it is what the schedule commits to in writing rather than which billing shape it uses.
When break fix is genuinely the right purchase
There is a real case for it, and providers rarely make it because there is no recurring revenue in it. It holds for a business under roughly ten people, with equipment bought inside the last three years and still under manufacturer warranty, with no compliance obligation and no customer security questionnaire in its future, running nothing more complicated than email, files and one cloud application, and with the honest tolerance to lose most of a working day while somebody who has never seen the estate gets orientated. At that size the record's median of $99.50 a user a month is a standing commitment set against a handful of callouts a year, and the arithmetic can go either way. What break fix cannot do at any size is cover the work that is invisible until it matters.
The real crossover is not headcount, it is who would notice
The trade quotes a staff number as the switching point and it is the wrong test. The useful one is a question: if a backup job failed quietly on a Tuesday, who in this business would know before the restore was needed? If the answer is nobody, the estate is already running on luck and the monthly fee is buying attention rather than repairs. Three other failures behave the same way: a leaver whose accounts were never removed, workstations that stopped taking patches months ago, and a certificate or licence renewal nobody is tracking. Break fix prices a visit after a problem announces itself. None of those four announce themselves, and all four are what proactive managed services is supposed to mean when the phrase is doing any work.
In house IT support versus outsourced, and why co-managed exists
One hire and a contract fail in opposite directions. A person you employ accumulates context, which is the expensive knowledge of which application the finance team cannot work without and which cable in the closet is not labelled, and that same person is one holiday, one resignation and one skill set wide. A contract buys the reverse: a bench, a rota that covers nights, monitoring tooling that costs more to license than it does to employ somebody, and no idea what your business does for its first year. Neither direction is a mistake, which is exactly why the co-managed shape exists, and a business that already employs somebody is usually choosing between the models around that person rather than instead of them.
How to choose a managed service provider once the model is settled
Three questions separate proposals, and none of them is the headline rate. First, the seat minimum: almost nobody publishes one, so ask for the smallest number of users the quoted rate is valid at, because a rate priced for forty seats reprices at twelve. Second, the written exclusion list, which is shorter than the inclusion list and is where the real money sits, and the unit the fee attaches to, since the record holds Powerful IT publishing "$75 per workstation per month" alongside "$125 per server" while 6 of the 7 priced providers quote per user. Third, the response commitment expressed as a number against a severity tier, and who holds the global administrative credential for your Microsoft 365 tenancy on the day the contract ends. A provider that answers all three in writing is comparable to another one that does.
Questions people ask about break fix
What does break fix mean in IT support?
No standing contract and no monthly fee. You call when something is broken and pay for the hours and parts it takes to fix it. Nothing in the arrangement pays anybody to monitor, patch or prevent between calls.
Is a managed contract cheaper than break fix?
Not necessarily, and no provider in this record publishes an hourly rate to compare against, so the honest answer is that a contract is predictable rather than lower. The 7 providers that publish a per-seat figure sit at a median of $99.50 a user a month, with Electric at "$10/user/mo" the lowest published and Ntiva at "Starting at $99 per user".
When should a business move off break fix to proactive managed services?
When nobody internally would notice a failed backup, an unremoved leaver or a machine that stopped patching. Those are the costs break fix cannot price, and they arrive long before a business reaches any particular headcount.
Can we keep our own IT person and still buy a contract?
Yes, and that is the common shape above about fifty staff. The internal person keeps the context and the judgement calls, the provider supplies tooling, out-of-hours cover and second-line depth, and the split has to be written down.
Is it cheaper to outsource IT service than to run it in house?
Below the point where somebody would notice a failure, usually yes; above it, rarely on cost alone. The honest comparison is a salary plus cover plus tooling against the monthly fee plus what the schedule excludes, not the fee against the salary.
How do outsourced IT providers differ once the model is settled?
On four answers rather than on the pitch: the seat minimum, the exclusion list as a list, the response commitment in hours with a consequence, and who holds the global administrative credential at the end of the contract.