Managed IT Support vs Pay-As-You-Go

When a small business outgrows “the person who’s good with computers”, there are two common ways to get proper IT support. You can pay someone when something breaks, often called break-fix or pay-as-you-go. Or you can pay a fixed monthly fee for managed IT support, where a provider looks after your systems continuously.

Both have their place. This guide sets out how each works, what it costs in practice, and how to tell which one fits your business.

How pay-as-you-go support works

With pay-as-you-go, you call when there’s a problem and pay for the time it takes to fix, usually by the hour or in blocks of hours. There’s no monthly commitment, and if nothing goes wrong in a quarter, you pay nothing.

It suits some businesses well:

Very small teams with simple setups, perhaps two or three people on laptops and Microsoft 365.
Businesses with someone in-house who handles the day-to-day and only needs occasional expert help.
One-off projects, such as an office move or a new Wi-Fi network.

The catch is that the provider is only paid when things go wrong, so there’s no one whose job it is to stop problems happening. Updates, backups and security checks tend to drift, and costs are hard to predict: a quiet year can be cheap, and a bad month can be expensive.

How managed IT support works

With managed IT support, you pay a fixed monthly fee, usually per user or per device. In return, the provider looks after your IT continuously. That typically means:

Unlimited helpdesk support, so your team can ask for help without anyone worrying about the bill.
Monitoring and maintenance of devices, with security updates installed and checked centrally.
Security and backup managed and tested, not just installed.
Onboarding and offboarding of staff, including accounts, devices and access.
Advice and planning, such as when to replace hardware and what to budget for next year.

The aim is fewer problems in the first place, and faster fixes when they do happen, because the provider already knows your setup.

Comparing the costs honestly

Pay-as-you-go looks cheaper on paper because you only see the invoices for the fixes. The hidden costs are elsewhere:

Downtime. Every hour someone can’t work costs you their time, and often a customer’s patience.
Slow fixes. A provider who doesn’t know your systems spends the first part of every call finding their way around.
Things nobody owns. Backups that stopped working months ago, a departed employee’s account still active, a laptop that hasn’t updated since last year.

Managed support costs more each month, but the cost is predictable and it covers the work that prevents those problems. For most businesses with five or more people relying on their IT every day, it works out cheaper over a year once downtime is counted.

Questions to help you decide

Ask yourself:

How much does an hour of downtime cost us, in wages and lost work?
Who checks our backups, security updates and accounts today, and how would we know if they’d stopped?
Do we want a predictable IT budget, or are we comfortable with variable costs?
Do we have contracts, insurers or customers asking about our security, such as Cyber Essentials?
Is our team spending time on IT problems instead of their actual jobs?

If most of your answers point to “we’d rather not worry about it”, managed support is likely the better fit. If your setup is simple and someone in-house has it under control, pay-as-you-go may be all you need for now.

A middle ground

Many providers can start with a smaller managed package covering monitoring, security and backup, with helpdesk time added as you need it. It’s a sensible way to get the preventive work in place without committing to everything at once.

How we do it

We provide managed IT support to small businesses and charities across London and Hertfordshire, with a fixed monthly fee, unlimited support and a UK-based team that answers the phone. You can see what’s included on our managed IT services page and how we structure packages on our pricing page.

Not sure which model suits you? Talk to us or call 0203 8833 444. We’ll give you an honest view, even if the answer is that you don’t need us yet.

See how managed IT works for small and medium businesses.