In-house versus outsourced IT, which is cheaper per year

The real question is rarely "what does an IT hire cost" but "what does it cost us when IT is down for a week or poorly run".

Try this first

1. 1Cost out a full-time junior IT employee broadly: gross salary plus around 30% employer contributions plus training plus tooling plus a laptop. That is your in-house baseline.
2. 2Add incident risk: how many hours of production do you lose per year if one person is sick and is your only IT. A week of lost production is a meaningful amount for most SMBs.
3. 3Now place an external retainer next to it. A fixed monthly fee is not an FTE but buys scale: an engineer pool, monitoring, knowledge base, vendor leverage.
4. 4Hybrid usually wins. An internal first line (office manager with IT portfolio) plus an external second and third line for architecture, security and projects. No full FTE, no 100% external.
5. 5Be honest about growth. Below 5 employees full-external is almost always cheaper. Above 50 an internal FTE starts paying back, provided they are well managed.

None of the above fits?

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