The honest answer to "how much does managed IT cost?" is that it varies enormously, and most providers make it deliberately difficult to compare quotes. I've been on both sides of that conversation for over twenty years, and the pricing confusion is not accidental. This article is an attempt to cut through it.
If you're a business in Adelaide with 20 to 100 seats trying to understand what you should actually pay for managed IT services, here's what you need to know.
The three pricing models you'll encounter
When you ask an MSP for a quote, you'll get one of three structures. Understanding the difference matters before you start comparing numbers.
Per-device pricing
A fixed monthly fee per managed endpoint: each workstation, server, and network device has a price. The total cost scales directly with the size of your environment. This is the most transparent model because the maths is straightforward and the scope is unambiguous. If you add five computers, your bill goes up by five times the per-device rate. Nothing hidden.
For Adelaide SMBs, workstation pricing varies depending on the scope of services included. Servers carry a higher per-device rate, reflecting the greater management complexity and the business-critical nature of server infrastructure. Managed network devices typically sit somewhere in between.
The total for a mid-sized business depends heavily on scope: whether 24/7 monitoring is included, whether on-site visits are covered, what security tooling is in the stack, and whether the agreement includes genuine SLAs with financial accountability. Book a call and we'll give you a realistic estimate for your specific environment.
Per-user pricing
A single monthly fee per user, regardless of how many devices that user has. This sounds simpler, and sometimes it is. The problem is that it can obscure device counts in environments where people have multiple machines, docking stations treated as separate endpoints, or a mix of office and remote setups. A per-user quote that looks competitive can become expensive once the provider audits your actual environment.
Per-user pricing also makes it harder to assess what's included for servers and network infrastructure, which are often bundled into tiers with their own assumptions about environment size. Read those assumptions carefully.
Tiered bundles
Bronze, Silver, Gold. Essential, Professional, Enterprise. The structure varies but the principle is the same: packages of services at different price points, with the lower tiers intentionally designed to be inadequate so you upsell to the higher tier. The risk here is paying for services you don't need to get the two or three things you do. If you're in a tiered bundle, ask the provider to list exactly which services in your chosen tier you're actually using. The answer is often instructive.
What drives the price up
Two providers can quote very different numbers for what looks like the same service. The variables that explain the gap:
- 24/7 monitoring and alerting. True round-the-clock monitoring costs money. Some providers include it; others only monitor during business hours and call it managed services anyway.
- On-site support included. Remote-only support is cheaper to deliver. If on-site visits are billed separately, that cost comes out somewhere.
- Security tooling. An endpoint detection and response (EDR) tool, email filtering, multi-factor authentication management, and vulnerability scanning add real cost. Providers who don't include them are cheaper on paper. They're also leaving you exposed.
- Compliance requirements. If your business operates under specific regulatory or contractual obligations, the work required to maintain and evidence compliance adds scope that general-purpose MSPs often don't price for.
- Infrastructure complexity. A flat network with cloud-only services costs less to manage than a hybrid environment with on-premises servers, multiple sites, or legacy applications that require careful handling.
What's often not included
The gap between the monthly fee and the total cost of IT support is often wider than it looks. Common exclusions in managed services agreements:
- Project work: migrations, new system deployments, significant configuration changes. These are usually billed at an hourly or project rate, sometimes at rates that surprise people who assumed "managed" meant everything.
- Hardware: procurement, installation, and warranty management are frequently out of scope unless explicitly included.
- Software licensing: Microsoft 365, security tools, backup platforms. Your MSP may manage these, but you're usually paying licensing costs on top of the management fee.
- After-hours emergency response: many agreements include a threshold of after-hours support, beyond which additional fees apply.
Ask any provider you're evaluating to give you a written list of what's explicitly excluded. A good provider won't hesitate. One who hedges is telling you something.
The cheapest option is rarely the cheapest
I've heard this line before, so I'll be specific about why it's true rather than just asserting it.
When a quote looks significantly cheaper than others you've received, the maths has to work somewhere. Providers pricing well below the market rate are either cutting corners on tooling, skipping proactive work to focus only on reactive tickets, under-resourcing your account, or building their margin back through out-of-scope charges.
We've taken on a number of clients who had previously been on cheap managed services agreements. The pattern is consistent: more downtime events that weren't caught proactively, security gaps that required remediation work, and documentation so poor that the migration to a new provider cost tens of thousands of dollars in billable hours. None of that showed up in the monthly invoice, but it was absolutely a cost of the cheap IT decision.
How to compare quotes properly
When you receive multiple quotes, comparing the monthly number alone is not useful. What you need to standardise before you can make a real comparison:
- Scope alignment. Are all quotes covering the same devices, services, and support hours? A quote that excludes servers or limits remote support hours will always look cheaper.
- What's explicitly included and excluded. Get this in writing from every provider. The differences between proposals are almost always in the exclusions.
- SLA terms. What does the agreement say about response and resolution times? What happens if those aren't met? A financial SLA means the provider has skin in the game. A best-efforts clause means they don't.
- Exit terms. How long is the contract? What's the notice period? What does offboarding look like? A provider who makes it hard to leave is one who knows their service won't keep you voluntarily.
How InterIntra approaches pricing
We price on a per-device model. That means every client knows exactly what they're paying for, and every change in their environment has a predictable cost impact. Our agreements include a written list of inclusions and exclusions, a financial SLA that has real consequences if we miss our response commitments, and exit terms that don't trap people who want to leave.
We don't have a Bronze tier designed to be inadequate. If you're engaging our managed services, the scope covers what your environment actually needs, including security tooling, monitoring, and helpdesk support that your staff can actually rely on.
If you're evaluating providers and want an honest conversation about what a well-scoped managed service should cost for your specific environment, we're happy to have it.