It is the first question most businesses ask and the hardest to answer honestly in a single number. Managed IT quotes for the same Brisbane business can differ substantially, and the difference is rarely margin. It is scope.
Rather than invent a figure that will not survive contact with your environment, here is how the pricing actually works and what to compare.
How providers structure managed IT pricing
Per user, per month
The most common model. You pay a monthly amount for each person supported, which covers their devices and access. It is predictable and scales cleanly with headcount, which is why most Australian providers, including REDD, lean on it.
Per device
Priced per workstation and server instead of per person. This can suit environments with shared machines, such as a workshop or a warehouse, and looks expensive in businesses where everyone carries a laptop and a phone.
Tiered packages
Bronze, silver and gold style bundles. Easy to compare on paper, but the difference between tiers is where the important detail lives, particularly around security and after-hours cover.
Blocks of hours
Prepaid support hours. This is not really a managed service, because the provider earns more when things break. It suits very small businesses and works poorly beyond that.
What actually drives your number
- Headcount and sites. The primary input, and multi-site adds coordination rather than just users.
- Servers and legacy systems. An old line-of-business application that nobody can patch costs more to support and more to secure.
- Security inclusions. The single biggest swing factor. Monitoring, detection and response, and awareness training are substantial services in their own right.
- Coverage hours. Business hours support and genuine 24x7 are different cost bases, because the second one needs people rostered overnight.
- Compliance obligations. Essential Eight maturity or a certification tier adds work, and that work is ongoing rather than one-off.
- The state of what you are handing over. Environments that have been neglected need remediation before a provider can responsibly support them.
The four inclusions that explain a cheaper quote
When one quote is markedly lower, the difference is almost always in one of these four. Ask about each in writing.
- After-hours support. Is it included, or billed at a premium rate when you need it at 9pm?
- Security monitoring. Antivirus is not monitoring. Ask whether anyone is watching identity and cloud activity, and whether they can act or only alert.
- Backup and recovery. Whether backups are included, and whether restores are tested rather than assumed.
- Project work. Whether migrations, upgrades and new site setups sit inside the monthly fee or are quoted separately. This is the most common source of unexpected invoices.
Questions worth asking any Brisbane provider
- Who answers the phone at 10pm, and where are they?
- What is your average time to first response, measured rather than promised?
- What security is included as standard, and what is an additional service?
- What happens in the first ninety days, and what does onboarding cost?
- If we leave, what do we take with us, and how is the handover run?
Cheapest is rarely the number that matters
The cost that does the damage is usually not the monthly fee. It is the outage that lasts a day longer than it needed to, or the incident that a monitored environment would have caught while it was still one account.
REDD is based in Milton and supports organisations across Brisbane, South East Queensland and nationally, either as the whole IT function or alongside an internal team. Our managed IT services in Brisbane page sets out what is covered, and a thirty minute conversation will get you a scoped figure for your environment rather than a range from an article.