Break-Fix vs Managed IT: Why GTA Businesses Are Making the Switch

Break-fix: you call when something fails, a technician works the problem, and you get an hourly invoice. Nobody is responsible for your systems between calls. Quiet months cost nothing.

Managed IT: you pay a recurring fee for a written scope, usually per user or per device. The provider owns patching, backups, accounts, security settings and the helpdesk for whatever the contract lists. Anything outside the list is billed separately, often at an hourly rate.

Neither model is automatically cheaper. The honest comparison is between what you spend now, including the time your own people lose, and what a managed scope would cost to cover the same ground.

This is the real difference. Under break-fix, the following tasks only happen if someone in your office remembers to ask and pay for them. In our experience they usually do not happen at all.

• Monthly patching of Windows, macOS, browsers and line-of-business software, with a record of what was installed and what failed.
• Restore tests. A backup that has never been restored is a guess. Somebody has to pull a file or a whole machine back on a schedule and write down how long it took.
• Microsoft 365 hygiene: audit logging switched on, legacy sign-in methods blocked, admin roles reviewed, MFA enforced for every account. See our Microsoft 365 security settings.
• Leaver handling: disabling accounts, converting mailboxes, recovering devices and changing shared passwords the day someone leaves.
• Licence and renewal tracking for domains, certificates, Microsoft 365 and security tools, so nothing lapses quietly.
• Email authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) moved to enforcement and kept there as you add new sending services.

You do not need anyone's price list to do this. You need last year's IT invoices and a rough log of outages. Work in hours first, then multiply by the rates you are actually quoted.

1. 01

   1. Add up last year's billed hours

   Pull every IT invoice from the last 12 months. Total the hours, not the dollars, and note the hourly rate. Separate emergency hours (after-hours, rush) from routine hours, because they are usually billed at a premium.

2. 02

   2. Count the hours your staff lost

   For each outage, estimate how many people could not work and for how long. Ten people down for three hours is 30 lost hours. Multiply by an average loaded wage. This number is usually larger than the IT invoice.

3. 03

   3. Price the missing maintenance

   Take the list in the previous section. Estimate the hours it would take to do properly under break-fix: for a 15-person office, patch review and restore testing alone can run to several hours a month. Multiply by your hourly rate.

4. 04

   4. Get a managed quote for the same scope

   Ask two or three providers to quote the exact scope you listed, in writing, with exclusions named. Our quote checker helps you line the quotes up.

5. 05

   5. Compare like with like

   Break-fix total = steps 1 + 2 + 3. Managed total = the quote + any hourly work it excludes + the downtime you would still expect. If break-fix comes out lower and you are comfortable carrying the risk, stay on it.

An illustrative 15-person office, not a client. Replace every figure with your own.

One to three people, cloud-only tools, no client data that would trigger a breach report, and an owner who is happy to handle accounts and backups personally. In that case pay by the hour and spend the difference on a good backup and MFA everywhere.

It stops making sense when an outage stops the business, when you hold personal or financial information about clients, or when nobody can say who has admin access to your Microsoft 365 tenant. If you are unsure which side you are on, the measurable signs page gives you thresholds to test against.

See how our managed IT plans are structured and our managed IT support practice, or go straight to IT support across the GTA.

If you move, insist on evidence each month rather than a promise: patch compliance by device, backup job results plus the date of the last restore test, a ticket summary, and any security alerts with what was done. If a provider cannot produce that, you are paying a fee for break-fix with a different name.

The case that shows the difference most clearly is our ERP database outage: root cause found in one morning, a written incident report the same day, then a proposal to close the gap (a tested backup for the database) so the failure does not repeat.

Run the five steps above on your own invoices. If you want a second opinion on the numbers, send them to us and we will tell you plainly if break-fix still suits you.