Break-Fix vs Managed IT: What Is Actually Cheaper?

The most common assumption about managed IT is that it's expensive and break-fix is cheap. In practice, the opposite is usually true once you add up all the real costs of unmanaged technology.

The Real Cost of Break-Fix IT

• Emergency IT service calls are billed hourly with no predictability
• Downtime is expensive and hard to budget for — you keep paying wages while nothing gets done
• Ransomware recovery routinely costs far more than prevention once downtime, recovery work, and lost trust are counted
• Staff productivity lost to slow computers, repeated issues, and waiting for IT help is rarely counted but always real
• Compliance violations from unmanaged security can result in fines that dwarf any IT investment

What Managed IT Actually Costs

GlobalTSS managed IT starts at $115/user/month. For a 10-person business that's $1,150/month — predictable, budgetable, and covering monitoring, helpdesk, security, backups, and Microsoft 365. Compare that to one ransomware incident or a week of downtime and the math becomes obvious.

The Right Question

The question isn't "can I afford managed IT?" — it's "can I afford what happens without it?" For most UP businesses, one serious IT incident costs more than a full year of managed services.