Handling IT reactively looks cheaper because the cost is invisible until something breaks. It is not that the callouts are expensive — it is that the expensive part is never the invoice. It is the half-day eight people spent unable to work.
| Approach | What it covers | Typical cost |
|---|---|---|
| Emergency callout | One incident, after it has already happened | $200–$500 |
| Part-time IT person | Available when they are not at their other job | $2,000+/mo |
| Full-time IT hire | Everything, plus benefits and holiday cover | $6,000+/mo |
| DigitalFix managed IT | Helpdesk, monitoring, patching, backups, M365 | $199/mo |
The comparison that actually matters is not managed IT versus nothing. It is managed IT versus the true annual cost of the reactive model — the callouts, plus the downtime, plus the security patching nobody got round to.
Where the risk actually sits
For a business under twenty-five people, the realistic threats are unglamorous: an unpatched machine, a reused password, a former employee whose access was never revoked, and a backup that has quietly been failing for four months. Sophisticated targeted attacks are not what gets small businesses. Housekeeping is.
All four of those are addressed by routine work rather than clever tooling — patching on a schedule, MFA enforced across Microsoft 365, offboarding done the same day someone leaves, and restore tests that actually run. That is most of what a managed plan is.
Why the fee is fixed
Per-incident billing quietly discourages people from reporting problems. If every call costs money, staff work around the broken thing instead of reporting it, and you find out about the failing drive when it fails rather than when it started warning.
A fixed monthly fee removes that. Nobody hesitates to raise a ticket, we see problems early, and our incentive is a stable environment rather than a busy one.
When we will tell you not to bother
If you are three people on laptops with everything in Microsoft 365 and no server, your setup may genuinely be simple enough that ad-hoc support is the right call. We will say so at the assessment. A managed plan sold to a business that does not need one is churn waiting to happen, and we would rather have the smaller honest relationship.