Break-fix IT looks cheaper than managed services on paper. When you count the hidden costs, the math flips hard.
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Break-fix IT looks cheap on paper. When you count the hidden costs, the real number is two to three times the invoice.
On paper, break-fix IT looks like the cheap option. You only pay when something breaks. No monthly retainer. No long-term commitment. Except the real cost of break-fix has very little to do with the hourly invoices. The real cost is in the things that go wrong because nobody is paying attention to the details every day.
Users on break-fix IT stop reporting small problems because they know the hourly meter will start. The slow computer, the printer that randomly fails, the application that crashes once a week, the Wi-Fi dead zone in the conference room. These accumulate into real productivity loss, and none of them show up on an IT invoice.
Break-fix IT is reactive by definition. Nobody is running a patching schedule. Security updates get applied when someone thinks of it or when a breach happens. The cost of a ransomware incident that could have been prevented by a patch is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, not including reputation damage.
Without monitoring, you learn about problems when they become outages. A failing hard drive in a production server could give weeks of warning through monitoring. Without it, the first sign is a business stop. The emergency response bill plus the cost of lost work is usually ten times what ongoing monitoring would have cost.
Break-fix shops bill hourly for every call to your software vendors, your internet provider, your phone provider, your copier provider. A managed services retainer includes all that vendor coordination at no extra charge.
A typical mid-market business on break-fix pays about $3,000 to $4,000 per month in direct IT invoices, plus another $5,000 to in hidden costs from the things above. The same business on managed services usually gets the direct costs under control and eliminates most of the hidden costs. The math almost always favors managed services once you count honestly.
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