The break-fix model feels simple: something breaks, you call someone, you pay to fix it. No ongoing contracts, no monthly fees.
But here’s what that model doesn’t show you.
The hidden costs of downtime
Widely cited industry estimates put the cost of IT downtime for a small business at hundreds of dollars per minute. When your server goes down on a Tuesday morning, you’re not just paying the technician. You’re paying in lost productivity, missed sales, and frustrated customers.
A proactive MSP catches failing hardware before it fails. A break-fix shop shows up after it already cost you.
Emergency rates vs. managed rates
Break-fix technicians charge premium rates for urgent work, often 2-3x their standard rate. Managed IT spreads that cost into a predictable monthly fee that’s almost always lower than the sum of your emergency calls.
Security gaps you don’t know about
Break-fix IT is reactive by definition. Nobody is monitoring your systems at 2am when ransomware starts encrypting your files. By the time you call Monday morning, it’s too late.
What break-fix actually costs
Break-fix pricing is labor pricing. You are buying hours, and the meter only starts once something is already wrong. The line items are usually some combination of:
- An hourly rate, billed in minimum increments. A ten-minute fix is rarely a ten-minute invoice.
- An emergency or after-hours multiplier for nights, weekends, and anything you flag as urgent.
- Trip charges for on-site work, sometimes per visit, sometimes per hour of travel.
- Project quotes for migrations, replacements, and anything too large to run as a ticket.
- Hardware and license markup, because procurement ends up on the same invoice.
The rate is not the important part. The structure is. Under break-fix, your IT spend is a function of how bad your year was. A quiet year looks cheap. One failed server, one ransomware incident, or one departure that left credentials active rewrites the entire budget, and none of it was planned.
What managed IT actually costs
Managed IT prices the other direction. You pay a flat monthly fee, usually per user or per device, and the work that prevents incidents is included rather than billed: monitoring, patching, backup verification, endpoint security, helpdesk, and vendor coordination.
Two things change immediately. Your IT spend becomes a function of headcount rather than chaos, so it can actually be budgeted. And the incentive flips. A break-fix provider earns more when your systems fail. A provider on a flat fee earns more when they don’t.
Expect the first few months to look different from steady state. Onboarding usually surfaces remediation work such as backups that were never verified, servers years behind on patches, and accounts that should have been disabled long ago. That catch-up work is typically quoted separately, and any provider who pretends it doesn’t exist is quoting a number they can’t hold.
If you already have internal IT staff, this isn’t an all-or-nothing decision. Co-managed IT keeps your team in charge and wraps specific layers around them: after-hours monitoring, patching, security tooling, or an escalation path for the problems one person shouldn’t have to own alone.
The costs that never appear on an invoice
This is where the two models actually separate.
- Downtime. Payroll keeps running while work stops. Add the rework, the missed deliveries, and the calls you have to make to customers.
- Deferred patching. Nobody bills you for the update that didn’t get installed. The exposure lands on you anyway.
- No strategic planning. Break-fix has no reason to tell you a server is three years past useful life. You find out when it dies, then buy the replacement under pressure at whatever price is available that week.
- The emergency premium. Urgent work costs more everywhere. Reactive IT means most of your work is urgent by the time anyone looks at it.
- Data loss exposure. A backup nobody has restored from is not a backup. Restore testing is routine under a managed agreement and rarely happens under break-fix.
- Institutional knowledge. Every new technician relearns your environment on your dime, and the last person’s undocumented workaround is now your problem.
The math
Compare the two on a twelve-month total, not on a monthly rate.
- Pull every IT invoice from the last 12 months. Add up every emergency call, every after-hours visit, every trip charge, every “quick fix” that turned into a day-long project, and any hardware bought through the provider.
- Add the hours your team lost to outages: people affected, multiplied by loaded hourly cost, multiplied by hours down.
- Add what you deferred. Hardware you didn’t replace and work you didn’t get to is borrowed, not saved.
- Divide by 12. That is your real monthly cost under break-fix.
- Put the managed quote next to that number, then compare scope rather than price. What’s included, what’s billed on top, what the response commitment is, whether security tooling and licensing are bundled or passed through at cost.
A worked example. The numbers below are invented to show the shape of the math, not NEBIS rates. Take a 25-person business paying $150 an hour with a one-hour minimum. Eighteen tickets averaging 1.5 billable hours comes to $4,050. Three after-hours incidents at three hours each, billed at 2x, adds $2,700. One hardware replacement project at twelve hours adds $1,800. That’s $8,550 in labor before anyone counts lost work, and a single four-hour outage that idles 20 people at a $35 loaded hourly cost adds $2,800 more. Call it $11,350 for the year, just under $950 a month, and none of it bought monitoring, patching, or a backup anyone tested.
If a flat monthly quote comes in above your number, the gap is what you’re paying to stop the incidents from happening and to have someone accountable when they do. If it comes in below, the decision makes itself.
Most businesses are shocked by the number.
Ready to switch to proactive IT? Talk to NEBIS — we’ll show you exactly what managed IT would cost for your business.