Almost every managed service provider prices the same way: a flat monthly fee per user or per device, with a long contract. It's easy to quote and easy to budget. It's also, for a lot of well-run companies, straightforwardly expensive.
We offer a usage-based model instead, so it's fair to explain when each one actually makes sense — including when per-seat is the better answer.
How per-seat pricing works
You pay a fixed amount per user per month regardless of how much support you consume. The provider prices the average, adds a margin for risk, and locks in a term.
It works well when: your ticket volume is high and unpredictable, you have no internal IT, your team is less technical, or your CFO values a perfectly flat line above all else.
It works badly when: your environment is stable and standardized, your staff are technical, you already have an internal IT person, or your headcount includes many light computer users — think field, warehouse, or clinical staff who barely touch a laptop.
How usage-based works
You pay for the monitoring, patching, security tooling and backup that must run continuously, plus the support time you actually use. Good months cost less. Bad months cost more, and you can see exactly why.
The catch to watch for — and the reason to ask hard questions of anyone offering it — is incentive alignment. Ask how the provider is compensated for reducing your ticket volume, and whether root-cause work is billable. If fixing the recurring problem earns them less, the model is broken.
Run your own numbers
- Pull 12 months of ticket data from your current provider — count and hours, by month.
- Divide your annual spend by total support hours to get your real effective hourly rate. This number surprises people.
- Separate fixed from variable. Security tooling, backup, monitoring and patching are fixed and should stay fixed. Human support time is the variable piece.
- Check your distribution, not your average. If 9 of 12 months are quiet and 3 are chaotic, usage-based usually wins overall. If every month is busy, per-seat is protecting you.
- Count your light users. Paying a full per-seat rate for someone who logs in twice a week is pure waste.
Questions worth asking either way
- What's the contract term, and what does exiting cost?
- What's explicitly out of scope and billed as a project?
- Are after-hours and emergency responses at a different rate?
- Do onboarding and offboarding count against the plan?
- What reporting do I get — ticket volume, response times, and where the hours went?
Where we land
We built our model around flexibility because most of our clients are competent, stable organizations that were subsidizing someone else's chaos. That's not a universal truth — if your environment is genuinely volatile, a flat fee may be the right insurance. Either way, ask for the data and do the arithmetic. If you want a read on which model your numbers point to, request pricing and we'll walk through it honestly.
