Hourly vs monthly IT support: which is cheaper?

The short answer

Hourly IT support is cheaper when your office needs only a handful of hours a month and nothing much needs looking after between calls. Monthly IT support is cheaper once the hours you would buy, plus the preventive work you would otherwise skip, add up to more than the flat fee. For a very small or very simple office, that crossover may never come. For an office of 8 to 10 people or more, with a shared network, email, files that matter and a couple of printers, it comes fast, usually inside the first year.

The reason is not that monthly plans are a better deal per hour. It is that hourly support only bills for the problems you notice, and the expensive problems are the ones nobody noticed: the backup that stopped running in March, the laptop that missed six months of security updates, the former employee whose account still works. A monthly plan covers those as routine. Hourly support does not, unless you pay for the hours to check.

I offer both from Dallas: hourly break/fix support with no contract at published rates, and a managed IT plan billed per user or per device, month-to-month. Below is the math I use to tell an owner which one will cost less, with my real hourly rates so you can check it yourself.

What does hourly IT support cost in Dallas?

My hourly rates are published, so I can be exact here. These are for break/fix work with no monthly agreement, billed by the hour with a one-hour minimum:

Remote means I connect to your computer or network over the internet and fix it from my desk, which is faster and cheaper for you and is how most problems get solved. Onsite means I come to your office in Dallas or across the DFW metroplex by appointment, which is for hardware, cabling, network equipment and anything that cannot be reached remotely.

Across the wider Dallas market, hourly business IT support is commonly quoted somewhere around $100 to $200 an hour in business hours, with after-hours premiums on top, and some companies add travel time or a two-hour onsite minimum. Ask about minimums and travel before you compare hourly rates, because a lower rate with a two-hour minimum can cost more for a 30-minute fix.

The full list of what I publish is on the pricing page. There are no rates I hide until the invoice.

What does monthly IT support cost?

Monthly, or managed, IT support is a flat fee per user per month or per device per month that covers the ongoing care of your office: monitoring, operating system and application updates, unlimited remote support, onsite visits when remote cannot fix it, antivirus and email security, backups and recovery, and management of your internet, router, firewall, switches, access points and printers.

As a typical market range, small-business managed IT in the Dallas area is commonly quoted somewhere around $100 to $175 per user per month. That is the market; it is not my price. I quote per user or per device after a short conversation, because the right number depends on whether you have a server, how many devices each person uses, and what software the business runs on. I wrote up the whole subject in how much managed IT services cost in Dallas.

For the break-even math below, I will use that market range so the numbers are honest and you can substitute a real quote later. What matters for the comparison is what the fee replaces: the hours of support you would have bought, plus the preventive hours you would not have bought but should have.

Where is the break-even between hourly and monthly?

Here is the arithmetic. Take the market range of $100 to $175 per user per month. For a 10-person office that is roughly $1,000 to $1,750 a month as a typical market figure. At my business-hours remote rate of $100 an hour, that fee is equivalent to about 10 to 17 remote hours a month. At $150 an hour onsite, it is about 7 to 12 onsite hours.

So the question becomes: does a 10-person office use 10 to 17 hours of IT work a month? If you only count the calls you make, probably not in a quiet month. If you count the work a managed plan does without being asked, it usually does. Here is an honest month for a typical 10-person Dallas office with a shared network, Microsoft 365 and a couple of printers:

That is 9 to 17 hours, mixed remote and onsite, which lands right around the flat fee. And that is a good month. Add one bad day, a failed drive, a ransomware scare or an internet outage that takes an afternoon, and hourly is more expensive than monthly for the year. Under about 8 people, or in an office where almost nothing is shared, the hourly column shrinks and hourly wins. The break-even is not a fixed headcount; it is whether the preventive rows are being done at all.

What are the hidden costs of hourly support?

Hourly support has one cost that never appears on an invoice: the work that does not happen. When every hour is billed, owners understandably avoid calling unless something is visibly broken, and preventive work gets skipped. Three examples I see in Dallas offices that have been on hourly support for a while:

• The backup nobody checked. A backup job that failed silently months ago, discovered on the day a server dies. The hourly bill for recovery is nothing next to the cost of the data.
• The updates nobody applied. Computers that have not restarted for updates in a long time, running a version of Windows or an application with a known hole. This is how phishing emails become real incidents.
• The accounts nobody closed. Former employees whose email and file access still work, because deactivating an account was never urgent enough to be worth an hour.

The second hidden cost is the hourly rhythm itself. Every call is a fresh incident. A problem that would have been noticed by monitoring and fixed in ten minutes becomes a two-hour call once it has taken the office down. And with a company that sends whoever is free, every hour starts with someone learning your setup, on your time. Because you deal with me directly, I remember your office, and my team works from the notes I keep on it, that particular cost is smaller with Cross River Tech than with a company that rotates technicians, but it does not go to zero.

The third is unpredictability. A quiet month costs nothing; a bad month costs more than a year of a monthly plan would have. That makes budgeting hard, which I cover in what a small business should budget for IT each year.

What are the hidden costs of monthly support?

It would be easy to write this article as an advertisement for monthly plans, so let me give the other side its due. Monthly support has costs of its own.

• You pay in quiet months. If nothing goes wrong in July, the fee is still due. That is the nature of a flat fee; you are paying for the preventive work and for availability, not for incidents. If your office is very simple, that trade may not pay.
• Minimums. Some providers set a minimum monthly fee or a minimum number of users, which can make a plan poor value for a 3-person office.
• Lock-in. Many Dallas agreements run for a year or more with automatic renewal. If the provider disappoints, the flat fee becomes a cost you cannot stop. This is the cost that matters most, and it is a feature of the agreement, not of monthly billing itself. Mine is month-to-month and you can cancel any time, which turns the quiet-month concern into a one-month concern.
• Scope creep in the other direction. A plan that calls too many things "projects" makes you pay a flat fee and hourly. Read the exclusions; I lay them out in what a managed IT services agreement usually includes.

If those four are handled, meaning no long lock-in, no unreasonable minimum, and a clear scope, then monthly support is simply a way of buying the hours you need at a predictable price, with the preventive work done as a matter of course. If they are not handled, hourly can be the safer choice even for a larger office, at least until you trust the provider.

Which Dallas IT companies charge hourly instead of monthly?

Fewer than you would expect. Many managed service providers in Dallas only take clients on a monthly agreement, because their business model depends on recurring revenue and their tools are priced per managed device. Ask for hourly help and you will often be told they do not do break/fix, or be offered a "project" at a rate designed to make the monthly plan look attractive.

The companies that do charge hourly tend to be smaller: independent consultants, small owner-led shops, and some computer repair businesses that also serve offices. The things to check with any of them are the same: the business-hours and after-hours rates, the minimum billing increment, whether travel is billed, whether remote work is available at a lower rate, and whether they will also take on the ongoing work if you decide you want it later.

I charge both ways, and I do not steer you toward one. My hourly rates are $100 remote and $150 onsite in business hours, $150 remote and $225 onsite after hours, weekends and holidays, one-hour minimum, no agreement required. My monthly plan is month-to-month and quoted per user or per device. Plenty of clients start hourly, see how the work goes, and move to monthly once the arithmetic above catches up with them; a few go the other way when their office shrinks. Both are fine. I wrote a separate piece on IT support without a contract in Dallas for owners who specifically want to stay hourly.

How to decide for your office

You can settle this in fifteen minutes with a notepad. Here is the sequence:

1. Count the people and devices. Users, computers, servers, printers, network equipment.
2. Estimate the hours you actually called for in the last year. Look at old invoices if you had a provider, or think about how many times the office manager spent a morning on a computer problem.
3. Add the hours nobody called for. Use the table above: patching, backup checks, account clean-up, security review. Be honest about whether any of it is happening now.
4. Price the total at hourly rates. Use my published rates or any provider's. Remember the one-hour minimum: five ten-minute problems in a month are five hours, not fifty minutes.
5. Compare against a monthly quote for your real headcount. Ask for one with the full inclusion list in writing.
6. Weigh the lock-in. If the monthly agreement is month-to-month, the risk of trying it is one month. If it is a year, hourly may be the better way to start.

If you would rather have me do this with you, get in touch and tell me how many people you have and what tends to go wrong. I will tell you which way is cheaper for your office, and if the answer is hourly, that is what I will quote.

Questions people ask

Written and reviewed by

Anthony Omini, founder of Cross River Tech

Over 15 years in IT across many industries, now running Cross River Tech, a small owner-led managed IT company in Dallas. Every article is written from his own client work and checked by him before it is published.

Want to know which is cheaper for your office? Tell me how many people and devices you have and what usually goes wrong. I will run the numbers both ways and quote whichever one costs you less.

Ask Anthony(214) 612-7080About Anthony