MSP pricing depends on several factors.
The goal of this article is to give IT evaluators three different MSP pricing examples.
I am defining an MSP as a managed IT services provider who charges a business a fixed monthly fee to monitor, manage, secure, and support all IT systems and users.
As a general rule, the fee estimates depend on your headcount and whether you have any full-time technical staff managing your infrastructure and supporting end users.
Organizations with up to fifty employees don’t typically have full-time IT personnel, while organizations with more than fifty people frequently do.
I will go into greater detail discussing these nuances and other factors that put an organization on the high end or the low end of the monthly cost spectrum.
Ultimately, I hope to give you some insights so you can spend more time getting to know a curated shortlist of contenders (two or three MSPs) versus conducting a cattle call with ten different IT providers.
Example One – A Business with 20 People
Suppose you are fortunate to have up-to-date, standardized technology with most of your digital assets in the cloud. In that case, your MSP pricing will be lower than an organization with a patchwork of older equipment onsite.
The more an MSP can automate a process and add value with strategic consulting, cybersecurity, and compliance advisement, the less time they are forced to spend on manual intervention.
As a result, a cloud-forward business will spend around $2,700.00 per month.
On the flip side, when an MSP has to play the combined role of a nurse/physician/surgeon/physical therapist to diagnose and treat a steady stream of disorders, they have to charge more or risk losing their shirts.
Businesses that fit this reactive IT environment profile will pay around $4,000.00 per month.
Example Two – A Business with 50 People
The pricing logic of the first section applies here as well as to the next section: you pay less if the MSP can deliver their services more efficiently. And you spend more if the MSP is continuously making special accommodations.
Perpetual improvising and expending unplanned physical labor to affect IT system equilibrium gets expensive.
The digitally fit business will pay around $5,000.00 while its dated and distressed counterpart is looking at $7,800.00 per month.
A business with fifty people is a different animal than a twenty-person entity. Generally speaking, they may be scaling at a more rapid pace and have a more complex application footprint. The business could also be confronting more rigorous regulation and compliance requirements.
Even if their systems are modernized and cloud-centric, they have more people, additional moving parts, and potential IT support noise.
For example, a full-service MSP will encourage clients to submit a help desk ticket for anything related to IT. This means your MSP could end up investing a considerable amount of time calling, emailing, and speaking with a third-party application provider.
“Vendor managing” incidents like this can add up to an extra six hours per month.
Example Three – A Business with 100 People
An organization with this headcount more than likely has in-house IT. Ideally, their roles are clearly defined based on their expertise: CIO, CTO, business analyst, applications, software development, infrastructure, and user help desk.
While an MSP could service the account without in-house IT, a common practice is to offer co-managed IT. This approach makes a lot of sense for several reasons.
The CIO or CTO of the business is more than likely a big picture technology strategist rather than a network or cloud engineer who wants to get in the weeds tinkering with local area network architecture minutia.
He or she would instead delegate these duties and others to an MSP with a portfolio of turn-key tools to automate and dramatically simplify the nuts and bolts of everyday IT.
The same mindset applies to software developers and application specialists. They are driving revenue-related endeavors and likely to be interested in advanced data analytics, BI, and AI.
Servicing internal users with password reset requests, lost document retrieval, and printer issues is not in their wheelhouse.
Partnering with an MSP for co-managed services is a powerful way to improve the effectiveness of your IT staffing by realigning resources.
A popular approach is to put the MSP in charge of the backend (network, cloud, infrastructure, cybersecurity, backup & disaster recovery, etc.) with individuals on the client-side in charge of basic help desk or line of business application support.
State-of-the-art environments with clearly defined roles and processes in place will spend approximately $5,500.00 per month.
Ones that need work will spend about $10,500.00 per month.
What’s Next?
There are exceptions to these general price ranges.
To get more specific, I’d recommend visiting the following link and setting up a brief discovery call with someone from our team.
Learn More: Integris MSP Pricing
If you are just getting started with your research and you enjoyed this article, you might also like the related content in our free eBook.