Fully managed IT support in Kent runs £35 to £75 per user per month, with the sensible middle at £45 to £60. Cheap quotes recover the difference through ticket fees, call-out charges, and "out of scope" invoices. Compare quotes by asking one question: what does this cost us in a bad month?
Ask five IT providers for a quote for managed IT support and you will get five numbers that are impossible to compare, because each one includes different things, excludes different things, and hides different costs in the gaps. This guide gives you the real market picture so you can read those quotes properly.
The headline range
For transparency: our own plans are £40 per user (remote support, Microsoft 365, and infrastructure management) and £55 per user (adds on-site visits with no call-out charges, email security, cloud backup, and year-round Cyber Essentials support). Minimum 5 users, 12-month rolling contracts with a 60-day exit clause.
What moves the number
Response model. A provider quoting £30/user answering tickets in four hours is selling a different product from one answering in minutes. Ask for the average response time, not the SLA ceiling. Ours is 3.3 minutes, and it is an average, not a target.
Who answers. First-line call handlers reading scripts cost less to employ than senior engineers, and it shows in both the price and the number of times your issue gets escalated before someone fixes it.
What is actually included. This is where cheap quotes live. On-site visits, security tooling, backup, out-of-hours work, and “project” labour are the usual extraction points.
A £35 quote that charges £95 per call-out and classes routine work as billable projects is not a £35 quote.
Your environment. Multi-site businesses, servers, compliance requirements, and specialist software all push the honest price up. A provider who quotes without asking about any of this is guessing, and one of you will pay for the guess later.
The five questions that expose a cheap quote
Ask each provider these directly, in writing:
- Are there per-ticket or per-incident fees? Any cap on tickets?
- What is the call-out charge for on-site work?
- What counts as "out of scope", and what is the hourly rate when it does?
- Are Microsoft 365 licences marked up? (They should be at cost; some providers quietly add 10 to 20 percent.)
- What is the contract term and exit clause?
A provider with nothing to hide answers all five in writing without flinching. Three-year lock-ins with 90-day notice windows exist because retention by contract is cheaper than retention by service.
Cheap, mid, premium: what you actually get
| Tier | Typical price | What it usually means |
|---|---|---|
| Budget | £25 to £35/user | Ticket-based, slow response, junior first line, everything extra is billable. Fine if IT barely matters to you. |
| Mid-market | £40 to £60/user | Fixed monthly cost, proper response times, security and management included. Where most SMBs should be. |
| Premium / co-managed | £65+/user | Dedicated resources, compliance-heavy environments, or co-managed setups alongside internal IT. |
The expensive mistake is not buying budget support; it is buying budget support for a business that depends on its IT. Downtime, staff sat waiting, and a breach recovery bill make the £20/user saving look very small.
How to compare quotes in one line
"What will this actually cost us in a bad month?"
Fixed-price support with everything included costs the same in a bad month. Cheap support does not, and bad months are when you find out.
Our pricing is published openly on our pricing page, per user, with the plan contents listed. If a provider will not publish theirs, it is worth asking why. And if you are weighing up a move, 8 signs your IT provider is coasting is the companion read.