Fixed retainer or pay-per-hour, which is cheaper for SMB
With few requests pay-per-hour wins. With a predictable baseline plus incidents the retainer wins. For a growing business the retainer almost always wins.
Try this first
- 1Look back at last year. How many hours of external IT work did you actually buy. Multiply by hourly rate. That is your real cost on the per-hour model.
- 2Compare with a retainer quote. A fixed monthly fee buys scale: engineer pool, monitoring, knowledge base. At the same hour usage retainer often lands lower than ad-hoc.
- 3Count risk. On per-hour an outage is two days of work at acute rates, often after-hours with surcharge. On retainer that response is in-scope.
- 4Maintenance is predictable, incidents are not. A retainer covers the predictable and absorbs part of the unpredictable. Per-hour covers neither proactively.
- 5The real argument is predictability. For management an identical IT bill each month is easier than something different every month. Cashflow planning wins there.
When to bring us in
For a comparison of retainer cost against your current pay-per-hour practice, /contact.
See also
- What does Managed IT actually cost for a 10-person SMBNo fixed number, but an honest breakdown. A full package for ten people is not 50 euros a month and not 5000 either.
- Microsoft 365 Business Standard versus Premium, what is extraThe price jump is real but Premium does not add Word features. It adds security and device management.
- Microsoft announces another price hike, what do I doSince NCE Microsoft adjusts pricing structurally. Without action you renew at the new price for a full year.
None of the above fits?
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Or skip the DIY entirely
Our Managed IT clients do not look these things up. One point of contact, a fixed monthly price, resolved within working hours.