Break-fix IT is sold as a simple arrangement. You wait until something fails, an engineer is sent, and you pay for that visit. The visit fee is only part of what it costs you. The larger figure is the time your people lose while they wait for the repair.
The cost of waiting until something fails
Work it out before the next incident. Take the hourly salary cost of the people who cannot work. Multiply by how many of them are stuck. Multiply again by the hours the outage lasts. That's the productivity loss, and it sits on top of the engineer's bill.
For a 30-person business with an average salary cost of £35 an hour:
| Incident | Lost productivity | |---|---| | 2-hour email outage | £2,100 | | Half-day internet failure | £4,200 | | Full-day server issue | £8,400 |
Add the emergency callout fee. Then allow for the same faults returning, because nobody is maintaining the systems between visits.
What sits inside a managed IT service
Managed IT is a monthly retainer. A provider takes ongoing responsibility for your technology, rather than arriving after a failure and invoicing the repair.
The work usually covers:
- 24/7 remote monitoring of endpoints, servers and network devices
- Automated patching of operating systems, third-party software and firmware
- Helpdesk cover, with unlimited tickets handled remotely or on site
- Regular maintenance, including health checks and performance tuning on a schedule
- A technology roadmap, so replacements and upgrades are planned instead of bought in a rush
Five jobs a break-fix arrangement never covers
- Monitoring. The engineer arrives after a failure. Nothing is being watched in between.
- Patching. Software stays unpatched, and unpatched systems are the number one attack vector.
- Planning. There's no roadmap, no budget for replacements and no lifecycle management for the hardware you already have.
- Documentation. Without written records of the environment, working knowledge disappears the moment the contractor stops showing up.
- Prevention. The arrangement only starts once something has already failed.
How the bill changes
Break-fix produces costs that jump from month to month. You cannot forecast the spend, because it depends on how many things fail. Managed IT produces one known monthly fee that covers the work above.
The retainer also lowers what you spend over the life of the systems, because the provider:
- Intercepts faults before they take people offline
- Keeps software patched, which reduces cybersecurity risk
- Keeps systems performing well enough that hardware lasts longer
- Advises on purchases so money is not wasted on equipment you will not use
What to check before you sign
Before you commit, look for:
- Clear pricing, charged per user per month, with the listed work inside the fee
- A named account manager, so you're not briefing a new person every time you raise a ticket
- Quarterly reviews that cover what is coming, not only what broke
- Security inside the same service: endpoint protection, MFA and patch management as standard
- An SLA that names response times and attaches a financial penalty if they miss them
Where this meets automation
Once systems are under a managed retainer, predictive monitoring can spot emerging faults before they become an outage. That watching sits with the same team that already handles the helpdesk and the patching.
Move from break-fix
Send your current setup through the contact page. We'll set it against a managed retainer, including the AI + Managed IT plan from £1,250 a month, with 24/7 monitoring and a four-hour response commitment.