"How much should we be paying for IT?" is one of the first questions we hear from business owners in Brentford and across West London. The honest answer is: it depends on how you buy it — and the cheapest-looking option is often the most expensive in practice.
The two ways to buy IT support
Break-fix means paying an hourly rate when something goes wrong. There's no monthly fee, which feels economical — but nobody is patching your systems, monitoring your backups, or noticing problems early. Your provider is, structurally, paid more when your IT fails more. Break-fix can suit a very small business with simple needs and genuine tolerance for downtime.
Managed IT means a fixed monthly fee — usually per user — covering unlimited support plus the invisible work: monitoring, patching, security updates, and backup checks. The provider is paid the same whether you have problems or not, which aligns their incentive with yours: prevention.
What managed IT typically costs
For small businesses in and around London, managed IT support generally runs from roughly £30 to £80 per user per month depending on what's included. At the lower end you get helpdesk and monitoring; at the upper end, full security stacks, backup for Microsoft 365, on-site visits and strategic reviews. For a ten-person office, that's a few hundred pounds a month — usually less than a single serious outage costs in lost billable time.
Be wary of quotes that look dramatically cheaper: the gap is usually security, backup testing, or on-site cover that reappears later as extras on an invoice.
Questions to ask any provider
Ask what's actually included per user — and what counts as billable extra. Ask how quickly they respond and whether that's a promise or an aspiration (a written SLA settles it). Ask whether backups are tested, not just taken; an untested backup is a hope, not a plan. Ask who turns up on-site and how fast when hardware fails. And ask what happens when you leave — good providers document your systems and hand them over cleanly; bad ones hold them hostage.
The cost of doing nothing
The alternative to paying for IT support isn't free. It's paid in staff time lost to slow machines, in the director who spends evenings being the unofficial IT person, and occasionally in the catastrophic week when ransomware meets an untested backup. Most businesses we take on aren't upgrading from another provider — they're upgrading from hoping for the best.
Our approach
We support businesses across Brentford, Chiswick, Ealing, Richmond and the rest of West London with straightforward per-user pricing and a free, no-obligation IT review to start. We'll audit what you have, flag the risks in plain English, and quote for exactly what you need — nothing more. If you'd like a benchmark for what you're currently paying, book a Business IT consultation and we'll give you an honest one.