How IT support pricing works in Galway

If you’ve asked around, you’ll have noticed nobody gives you a straight number. That isn’t always evasion — IT support is priced on how much of your business it has to look after, and until someone knows that, any number is a guess. So instead of a guess, here’s how the pricing actually works, so you can judge any quote you get, including mine.

There are two ways to pay, and they suit different businesses

Pay as you go. Something breaks, you message, it gets fixed, you’re billed for the time it took. No monthly fee, nothing to cancel. On-site visits carry a different rate from remote work, because the drive is real time too.

Managed support. A fixed monthly fee, and the day-to-day is covered: the printer that stopped, the new starter’s laptop, the mailbox that’s gone quiet, patching, monitoring, licences. You stop thinking about it and I don’t have to bill you for every ten minutes.

The honest test is simple. If you’d rather pay for the twenty minutes a problem takes than pay every month for problems you might not have, you want pay as you go. If your business has staff, and a morning without email costs more than a month of cover, you want managed.

What a managed fee is actually priced on

Users. The single biggest driver. Every person with a login, a mailbox and a device is somebody whose things can break. A managed fee moves with headcount — up when you hire, down when someone leaves — which is fairer than a flat fee that quietly stops matching your business.

Servers and systems. A server, a phone system, a line-of-business app like Dynamics — each is a separate thing to keep running, and each is priced as a line of its own rather than hidden in the per-user number.

Service level. Whether you want the standard cover, or direct access to the person doing the work with tighter response commitments. That’s one decision per business, not per person — I don’t classify your staff into tiers and argue about who counts as which.

What’s included, and what isn’t. Routine work is in: incidents, requests, changes to users and devices, licence admin, dealing with vendors on your behalf. Projects are out: migrations, new systems, redesigning your security or access. Anyone who tells you “everything is included” has either priced in a lot of projects you won’t need, or will surprise you later.

Why per-user is the fair model

Because you can check it. An invoice that says this many users, this many servers, at these rates is one you can verify against your own staff list. An invoice that says managed IT — monthly is one you take on trust. I bill on counts pulled from your systems, not from memory, and the counts go on the invoice so you can see where the number came from.

Why there’s a minimum

Managed support only makes sense above a certain size. Below roughly ten users, the fixed overhead of managing an account — monitoring, documentation, reporting — costs more than the support you’d actually use, and you’d be paying for it. So I don’t sell managed cover to a business that small; I’ll tell you to stay on pay as you go, and you’ll be better off. If a provider is happy to put a three-person business on a monthly plan, ask what you’re paying for.

What a term means, and what it doesn’t

A managed agreement runs for an initial year, then month to month. That’s a commitment, not a lock-in: it’s what lets both sides plan, and it’s what makes the monthly price stable rather than re-quoted every time someone leaves. What you should not accept is a long term with an automatic renewal you have to fight your way out of. Pay as you go has no term at all.

The four questions to ask any IT provider (including me)

1. Is it priced per user, and will you show me the count on the invoice? If they can’t, you can’t check it.
2. What’s a project and what’s included? Get the boundary in writing before you sign, not after the first surprise invoice.
3. What are your actual hours, and what happens outside them? A provider who promises 24/7 with two staff is promising something they can’t deliver. Mine are Monday to Friday, nine to six, and I’ll often pick up outside that — but that’s goodwill, not a commitment, and I won’t pretend otherwise.
4. Who actually does the work? The person who sells you the plan and the person who answers when the email is down are often different people. With me they aren’t.

So what will it cost you?

A short conversation. Tell me how many people you have, what they’re running, and what breaks most — and you’ll get a written number, broken into lines you can check, with no obligation attached to asking. Message me on WhatsApp or ring 089 960 2794.

Frequently asked questions