What Are You Actually Paying Your IT Provider For?
Pull up your bank statement. Find the monthly charge to your IT provider. Now tell me what they did for you last month. If you drew a blank, that's the whole post.
I'm not saying fire them. I'm saying you should be able to answer the question, because the 2026 price of real managed IT runs $75 to $250 per user per month, and at that price you deserve an answer.
1. Everything on the invoice falls into three buckets
Bucket one is managed: patching, helpdesk, monitoring with an actual response, backups somebody verifies. Bucket two is monitored, the great weasel word of the industry. Ask what happens when the monitor fires at 2 a.m. If the answer is that somebody checks it in the morning, you're paying for a dashboard, not a service. Bucket three is the retainer for nothing: you pay every month, nothing ever breaks, and nothing proactive ever happens either. That last one is the most expensive kind of cheap.
2. Sanity-check your bill against the going rate
2026 pricing guides cluster around $75 to $200 per user per month for genuine small-business managed IT, with most landing $100 to $200 for full coverage: helpdesk, patching, monitoring, baseline security. A 10-person company should expect roughly $1,000 to $2,000 a month. If you're paying $400 a month for 15 users, you don't have managed IT. You have break-fix with a subscription label. Straight break-fix runs $100 to $200 an hour with no prevention included, so know which one you're actually buying.
One more tell: multiple guides note that anything under about $80 per user usually means security essentials are missing. Cheap IT and secure IT are different products.
3. The 20-minute audit
Ask for the last 90 days of tickets. Count how many were proactive, found by them, versus reactive, started by you calling. Ask when the last patch cycle ran and what it covered. Ask what the monitoring did the last time it caught something. Ask when your backups were last restore-tested, and ask to see the log. Then ask what happens if you leave: who owns the admin passwords, how long the handover takes, whether there's a termination fee.
A good provider answers all of that without blinking. A bad one gets vague, and vagueness is your answer.
4. When it's actually worth the money
If an hour of downtime costs you real revenue, managed IT is cheap insurance. If you handle regulated data, it's not optional. But if nothing ever breaks and nothing is ever done, you're not buying IT. You're donating to an IT company. Renegotiate the scope or walk.
The audit takes 20 minutes and one email: send me the last 90 days of tickets and your last backup restore test. Send it this week.