Onsite is the most expensive word in this trade and the one least often defined. Of 29 IT providers read on 10 September 2026 for this record, seven publish any per-seat figure and not one publishes a rate for a visit, a mileage boundary or a monthly allowance of them. So the number a buyer is quoted almost never says what happens the first time somebody has to drive, and that is the line worth settling before a signature rather than after a failure.
Onsite is a distance, a clock and a count, or it is nothing
Three measurements turn the word into something enforceable. The distance: which addresses are inside the service area at no extra charge, and what the charge is beyond it, stated per mile or as a banded travel fee. The clock: the window inside which an engineer is committed to arrive for an unplanned visit, which is a different commitment from the window for answering the phone. The count: how many visits a month or a quarter are included before billing starts, and whether an unused visit rolls forward. Powerful IT is the only provider in this record that publishes a per-site line at all, at "$150 per location" beside "$75 per workstation per month", and even that is a subscription rather than a visit rate.
Three contract shapes, and the one that is a surprise
A contract with onsite included names the allowance and the area, and the monthly fee carries the travel. A contract with onsite available names an hourly or half-day rate, a minimum charge and whether travel time is billable, which is where a two hour job becomes four. A contract that says nothing is the third shape and the common one: the visit is then treated as work outside the agreement and billed at the project rate, which is the highest number the provider has. Asking which of the three is on offer, and asking for the rate card that sits behind shapes two and three, costs one sentence in an email and is the difference between a known and an unknown cost in the first bad week.
On demand IT support and emergency IT support services mean paying a premium to a stranger
Both phrases describe the same purchase: a firm with no contract buying an engineer at short notice for an estate nobody outside the building has documented. The premium pays for the queue jump and for the hours of discovery that a contracted provider would already have done, which is why the first invoice often exceeds what the work looked like it should cost. What it does not buy is continuity: the person who fixes it leaves with the knowledge, no monitoring is left behind, and the same fault is priced from scratch next time. Anybody buying this way twice in a year is paying contract money without the contract, and should ask both firms for the seat rate instead. No provider in this record publishes an emergency callout rate, so the only way to know it is to ask for it in writing before the engineer is dispatched.
White glove IT support should be a name and a number, not an adjective
In the trade's own copy the phrase signals executive support and commits to nothing. In a schedule it can be made real with two things: a named engineer who knows the estate and appears on the account, with a stated answer for holidays and illness, and a shorter response commitment for a defined list of people, written as minutes rather than as priority language. A provider that will put both in the schedule is selling capacity it has. A provider that offers the phrase and declines the two lines is selling tone. Worth asking as well how many accounts the named engineer carries, because a name attached to too many estates behaves exactly like the shared queue it was meant to replace.
What a remote IT support company cannot do: remote workers sit outside the visit model
A remote IT support company can reach a laptop anywhere, and remote IT support services do close the overwhelming majority of tickets, so the gap is not the fixing. It is the physical half. A home is not a site, so the contract has to name who ships a replacement machine and how fast, who is responsible when the fault is the household broadband or a router the provider never supplied, whether a home visit is available at all and at what rate, and who collects equipment when somebody leaves. Also worth settling who holds the global administrative credential for the Microsoft 365 tenancy, because with no office to visit that credential is the whole estate, and the end of a contract is a bad time to discover the provider owns it.
Questions people ask about onsite IT support
What does onsite IT support actually include?
Whatever the schedule says, which is often nothing specific. Get the covered area and the charge beyond it, the arrival window for an unplanned visit, and the number of visits included before billing starts.
How much does an onsite visit cost?
No provider in this record publishes a visit rate or a mileage charge. Seven of the 29 publish a per-seat monthly figure and those cover remote work, so a visit rate has to be asked for directly.
Is emergency IT support worth it without a contract?
Once, for a genuine outage. Twice in a year and the premium plus the repeated discovery work costs contract money without the monitoring, documentation or named engineer a contract brings.
Do remote IT support services cover people working from home?
Only if it says so. Remote fixes usually extend everywhere, but shipping hardware, home broadband faults, routers the provider did not supply and equipment collection need their own lines.