What Managed IT Actually Costs a Canadian Small Business

Managed IT is almost always priced one of three ways: per user, per device, or a flat monthly fee for the whole business. Same provider, same work, three very different annual totals depending on which model you end up in. The lowest-looking unit price frequently belongs to the model that suits your business worst.

Per-user pricing counts people. It works out well if your staff each carry a laptop and a phone, because the extra devices ride along inside the seat. Per-device pricing counts endpoints, and it wins when a lot of your people are part-time, seasonal, or sharing a workstation on rotation — a restaurant with forty staff and six machines is a per-device business, not a per-user one.

Before comparing anything, ask what a user is in the contract. A person, a mailbox, or a person with at least one managed device? What about the contractor who needs access for six weeks, or the shared info@ address? Those definitions decide your invoice, and they live in the appendix rather than the summary page.

Flat pricing is the easiest to budget and the hardest to compare. One number covers the business, which is fine right up until you hire four people or open a second location. Ask what triggers a re-quote — a headcount band, a new site, a server — and get the answer in the agreement rather than in somebody's email.

A low monthly figure is usually a scope decision rather than a discount. The work hasn't gone anywhere. It has been moved onto a different line, on a different invoice, and you'll meet it later.

The exclusions are consistent enough to list. New-hire setup, billed per device. Offboarding, sometimes billed too. Anything the contract classifies as a project — a migration, a firewall replacement, an office move, an operating system upgrade cycle. After-hours and weekend response. On-site visits, and the travel time to get there. Backup storage above a cap you will cross in your second year. Security work such as an MFA rollout, endpoint detection, or phishing training, sold as add-on tiers.

Vendor management is the line people forget to look for. When your practice management software breaks, somebody spends ninety minutes in a queue with that vendor's support desk and then explains the answer to your staff. If the plan doesn't cover that, it lands back on your office manager, which is exactly where it sat before you hired anyone.

A quick test before you sign anything: write down the last six IT problems that cost your team real time. The backup that had been failing since spring, the printer nobody could reach after the office moved. Then ask each provider, in writing, which of those six their plan would have covered.

Nearly every plan says unlimited somewhere on the first page. The definition underneath is where the money is.

The standard wording runs close to this: unlimited remote support, during business hours, for supported devices in a supported configuration. Each clause takes something away. Remote takes out the visit. Business hours takes out Sunday. Supported configuration is the one that bites — an operating system past end of support, the server in the closet running an application from 2013, the workstation wired to your label printer that nobody is allowed to patch.

Most agreements also carry a fair-use clause. It sits unenforced for years and then matters exactly once, in the month when several things go wrong at the same time. Ask what the threshold is and what the rate is on the other side of it.

This isn't a trick, and unlimited is a fair deal for the ordinary shape of small-business IT — password resets, a printer, a mailbox that stopped syncing. The risk is assuming it stretches to cover the thing that will genuinely hurt you: a three-day recovery after a ransomware incident, or the migration you keep postponing.

Onboarding comes first. Somebody has to document what you actually have — accounts, devices, licences, admin credentials, and the arrangements that exist only in the memory of whoever set up your network in 2019. Serious providers charge for this, because it is real work. If it doesn't appear on the quote, find out whether it is included or simply hasn't been thought about.

Remediation comes next. The onboarding audit finds things: admin accounts without MFA, a backup job that has been failing quietly for months, a router past end of life, five former employees with live accounts and active licences. Fixing those is project work rather than covered work. Ask for a fixed first-ninety-days scope, or at minimum a ceiling, so discovery does not turn into an open-ended invoice.

Licences sit alongside the fee, always. Your Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace subscriptions are a per-user cost of their own, and a quote showing only the management fee is showing you half the bill. Having both on one invoice is easier to administer — we resell both directly for that reason — but they remain two separate charges and you should see each one.

Last, the exit. Leaving costs something, and what leaves with you varies more than anything else in the agreement. Ask who owns the Microsoft 365 tenant, the domain registrar login, the documentation, and the monitoring agent sitting on every laptop. Get it in writing at the start. A provider who owns the tenant your business runs on turns a change of supplier into a negotiation you enter from behind.

Put both on the same twelve-month total before anything else. Monthly fee times twelve, plus licences, plus onboarding, plus per-hire setup multiplied by the number of people you actually hired last year, plus the one project you already know is coming. Quotes that looked far apart often land close together, and now and then they swap places.

Then send both providers the same short list of questions by email, so the answers exist in writing. What counts as a user or a device, and how are shared accounts treated? Is the response target in the contract or only on a slide? Which hours are covered, and what is the rate outside them? Name three things you would bill a business like ours for separately. Who owns our Microsoft 365 tenant and our admin credentials? How is remediation handled after onboarding, and what gets handed over if we leave?

Ask one thing that appears on no quote: who answers the phone. The person selling you the plan is not the person supporting you. Find out how many clients your assigned contact carries and whether you'll be explaining your setup from scratch every time you call.

If a provider goes vague on tenant ownership or on what happens at the end of the term, that vagueness is the most useful thing you'll learn all week.

Tickets are the visible part of managed IT and the least important part of the value. The rest sits in work you never see: the backup that gets tested rather than assumed, the account closed the same afternoon someone resigns, patches that land on a schedule, a licence count that matches your real headcount.

None of that produces anything you can look at in a monthly report, which is precisely why it is the first thing a cheap plan quietly drops. You find out it was missing during an incident. By then the price difference has stopped being interesting.

Our own answer to this is deliberately boring. Teralis IT Care Plans start at $499 a month, flat, scoped to your headcount and devices, with a dedicated project manager who knows your setup instead of a queue that reassigns you each time. Because we resell Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace directly, the licences and the support arrive together.

Whoever you end up hiring, price the whole thing: the monthly fee, the licences, the onboarding, the projects already on the horizon. A plan you understand at a higher number will cost you less than a cheap one that surprises you in month four.