On paper, break-fix looks cheaper: you only pay when something breaks, so a quiet month costs nothing. A flat managed-IT fee comes due whether or not anything went wrong. For a lot of owners that’s the whole comparison — and it’s the wrong one, because it counts only the costs that show up on an invoice. Here’s the honest math for a 25-person business, counting the costs both models actually carry.
Break-fix is reactive. Something breaks, you call, someone bills you hourly to fix it. There’s no ongoing relationship, no monitoring, and no one responsible for preventing the next problem — and the incentive is uncomfortable when you think about it: the provider earns when things go wrong. Managed IT is a flat monthly fee covering proactive monitoring, patching, security, and help-desk support, with a built-in incentive to keep things from breaking, because the provider absorbs the cost of fixing what they failed to prevent.
Rates vary, so treat these as illustrative ranges, not a quote. In the Phoenix market, break-fix labor commonly runs $125–$175/hour, and managed IT for a small business typically lands around $100–$200 per user per month depending on what’s included. For 25 people, a managed plan might run roughly $2,500–$4,000/month. In a month where nothing breaks, break-fix “wins” — you paid little or nothing. But nothing-breaks months aren’t the ones that matter. A single server failure with no monitoring can mean emergency labor over several days plus rush hardware plus data recovery — easily five figures. A ransomware incident is worse, and its biggest cost isn’t the repair. It’s the downtime.
Downtime is the big one, and break-fix quietly loads all of it onto you. The clock starts when something breaks and doesn’t stop until someone’s available, diagnoses it, orders parts, and fixes it. Take a conservative loaded cost of $40/hour per employee: 25 people down for one day is roughly $8,000 in lost productivity — for a single incident, before the repair bill.
Then there’s slow response — break-fix serves whoever called first, so you wait in line, while managed clients get contracted response times. There’s the absence of prevention: the failing drive a monitored environment swaps calmly on a Tuesday is the same drive that, unwatched, dies on a Friday and takes the server with it. There’s security drift, as patches, backup checks, and intrusion monitoring simply don’t happen between calls. And there’s budget unpredictability — break-fix turns IT into a series of surprise bills that always arrive at the worst time, while managed IT is a fixed line item you can plan around.
Sometimes it genuinely does. A very small shop — a handful of people, no server, nothing that would halt the business if a laptop died for a day — can reasonably run on break-fix plus a good cloud backup. If an outage is a nuisance rather than a crisis, paying only when something breaks is defensible. The calculation flips the moment downtime becomes truly costly, and for a 25-person business it almost always has: you have a server or critical cloud systems, real security and compliance exposure, and 25 salaries that get paid whether or not people can work.
Break-fix optimizes for the invoice; managed IT optimizes for uptime and predictability. Add up a full year — downtime, emergencies, and the prevention that quietly didn’t have to happen — and the managed model usually comes out ahead for a business this size, with far fewer bad Fridays. The way to settle it for your business is to price out your own downtime: what does one day with your team unable to work actually cost? That number tends to end the debate.
Want that number for your business? Book a free 30-minute consult and we’ll work through your real costs both ways — and tell you honestly which model fits, even if it’s not us.
Choosing a managed IT provider is easy to do badly and expensive to unwind. You’re handing someone the keys to your systems, your data, and much of your ability to operate — and every provider will tell you they’re responsive, secure, and a great fit. The trick is knowing which questions actually separate a good MSP from a mediocre one, and which answers should make you walk away. Here’s what to look for, what to look out for, and the contract terms that matter more than the monthly price.
Beyond the monthly price, read for scope (exactly what’s included and what triggers extra billing), response and resolution commitments in writing, term and termination (length, notice period, early-exit terms), data and access ownership (explicit language that your data, credentials, and documentation are yours and returned in full if you leave), and a clear split of security responsibilities between you and them.
Underneath every question is one thing you’re trying to learn: is this a company that will do the quiet, unglamorous work of keeping your systems healthy when nobody’s watching — or one that shows up only when something’s on fire and bills you for the privilege? The good ones don’t mind hard questions; they appreciate them, because a client who asks about backup testing and data ownership understands the value of doing it right. If a provider gets defensive when you ask how you’d leave, you’ve learned what you needed to know.
Interviewing providers right now? Book a free 30-minute consult. We’re glad to answer every one of these about how we work — and if we’re not the right fit, we’ll tell you.