The managed IT vs break-fix decision comes down to one piece of maths that most comparisons skip. Break-fix looks cheaper because you only pay when something breaks. But the repair bill was never the real cost. The real cost is the downtime while you wait for the fix, the incidents that were preventable, and the absence of anyone thinking about your IT before it fails.
This post does the honest numbers for a growing Australian business, the kind that started on break-fix at 10 staff and is now wondering why IT hurts at 50.
What is break-fix IT and what does it really cost?
Break-fix is exactly what it sounds like. Your IT provider has no ongoing role in your business. When something fails, a server goes down, email stops, a device is compromised, you call them, they fix it, and they bill for time and parts.
Brisbane break-fix providers typically charge between $150 and $280 per hour, with emergency and after-hours callouts at the top of the range. Response time is whenever they can fit you in. You are a reactive call, not a priority client, and the provider earns more when you have more problems. Think about that incentive for a moment.
The hourly rate is the visible cost. The hidden costs are the ones that grow with your headcount:
- Downtime multiplies by staff. An outage that annoyed 10 people now stops 50. The same incident costs five times more than it did when you signed up for break-fix.
- Nobody is preventing anything. No monitoring, no patching, no security baseline. Problems grow quietly until they become incidents.
- No roadmap. Nobody is planning hardware replacement, licence renewals, or security posture. Every IT decision is made mid-crisis, which is the most expensive time to make it.
- Surprise bills. IT spend arrives as unbudgeted spikes at the worst moments, which makes every incident a finance conversation as well as a technical one.
What does downtime actually cost a 50-person business?
For a typical Australian SMB, a realistic all-in downtime cost is around $5,600 per hour once you include lost productivity, lost revenue, recovery costs, and the staff time spent managing the incident instead of working.
| Scenario | Break-Fix Cost | Managed IT Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Server outage (4 hours, 50 staff affected) | $22,400 downtime + $1,200 repair | Included in monthly fee |
| Ransomware (3 days recovery) | $134,400 downtime + recovery costs | Likely prevented by proactive security controls |
| Email failure (2 hours) | $11,200 downtime + callout fee | Detected and resolved before staff notice |
Three incidents in a year at four hours each costs a 50-person business roughly $67,200 in downtime alone, before a single repair bill. And that is the moderate year. The bad year is the ransomware row of the table.
Now the other side of the ledger. Our pricing is public: a flat platform fee plus a per-user rate, which for a 50-person business lands around $9,000 per month. That is not a small number. But it buys the monitoring, patching, and security management that prevents most of the incidents in the table above from happening, and it converts IT from unbudgetable spikes into a line item you can plan around.
What does managed IT include that break-fix does not?
A genuine managed IT services engagement is a different product, not a cheaper way to buy the same repairs:
- Continuous monitoring. When a disk starts failing or a server load spikes, the provider knows before you do, and usually fixes it before you notice.
- Patch management. Operating systems and software kept current, closing the vulnerabilities that ransomware exploits. This is the single control break-fix businesses most reliably lack.
- Managed security. Endpoint detection, email filtering, and backups that are actively managed and tested, not installed and forgotten.
- Predictable pricing. A flat monthly fee aligned with the provider's incentive: they profit when your systems are healthy, not when they break.
- Strategic input. Regular technology reviews and a replacement roadmap, so IT decisions get made before the crisis rather than during it. This is what we call technology governance.
How do you know your business has outgrown break-fix?
Nobody sends you a letter when you cross the line. The business grows, the IT stays reactive, and the gap widens quietly until something expensive happens. These are the signs we see most often in businesses that have already outgrown the model without noticing:
- Someone senior has become the unofficial IT person. A director or operations manager spends hours a week triaging IT problems and chasing the break-fix provider. Price that time at their salary and the "cheap" model stops being cheap.
- The same problems keep coming back. Break-fix fixes the symptom you called about. Nobody is paid to find the cause, so you buy the same repair repeatedly.
- Nobody can answer basic security questions. Is MFA on every account? When were the servers last patched? Would the backups actually restore? If the answer is "we would have to check", nobody is managing it.
- A client or insurer has started asking about your IT. Cyber insurance questionnaires and customer due diligence both assume someone is accountable for your security. "We call a guy" is not an answer that passes.
- Onboarding a new starter takes days. No standard process for accounts, devices, and access means every hire loses productive days and every departure leaves access behind.
Two or more of those and the question is no longer whether to move, it is how much the delay is costing.
When does break-fix still make sense?
Break-fix is genuinely appropriate in a narrow set of cases: sole traders with minimal IT, businesses with an in-house IT team that only needs occasional specialist support, or very early-stage companies running entirely on cloud tools with nothing to maintain.
The tipping point comes earlier than most owners expect. Once you have more than a handful of staff, client data worth protecting, or any system whose failure stops work, the maths above starts running against you. If your business has grown past the point where "call someone when it breaks" feels safe, that instinct is usually right.
What does switching from break-fix to managed IT involve?
The perceived pain of switching keeps a lot of businesses on break-fix longer than the numbers justify, so it is worth knowing what the move looks like:
- Assessment. The incoming provider audits what you have: devices, servers, licences, security posture, and the risks nobody has looked at. This is usually the first complete picture of its IT the business has ever had.
- Onboarding. Monitoring and security tooling gets deployed, credentials are captured into proper documentation, and the immediate risks get fixed. Expect the first month to surface problems the break-fix years accumulated. That is the backlog being paid down, not the new provider creating work.
- Steady state. Patching and monitoring run in the background, support requests go to a helpdesk with a response commitment, and you get a technology roadmap with the spend visible before it happens.
One thing to insist on with any provider: the documentation of your environment belongs to you. A good MSP hands you the keys to your own business; it does not hold them hostage. Ask the question before you sign.
If you want to see the numbers for your own headcount, our pricing page has a calculator, or book a discovery call and we will walk through what your current break-fix spend is really costing you.
