The two models
Break/fix is hourly: something fails, you call, you pay for the repair. Nobody is monitoring anything between incidents, and nobody is accountable for preventing the next one.
Managed IT is a flat monthly fee. Your provider monitors and maintains the environment continuously, and is accountable for uptime rather than repairs.
The incentive problem
Under break/fix, your provider earns more when your technology fails. Nobody sets out to be slow, but the model quietly rewards breakage and gives nobody a reason to invest in prevention. Managed IT inverts that: every problem prevented protects the provider's margin as well as your day.
Running the numbers
Take a 20-person business. A managed plan at roughly $90 per user is about $1,800 a month, covering support, monitoring, patching, and security.
Now price a single bad day under break/fix. Twenty people idle for four hours, plus emergency labour, plus whatever the incident cost in missed work and goodwill. One serious outage a quarter erases the apparent saving — and that assumes nothing is lost permanently.
The costs that sink break/fix budgets are rarely on the invoice: downtime, staff waiting, work redone, and problems that were cheap to prevent and expensive to fix.
Budget predictability is the underrated benefit
Break/fix produces a jagged, unforecastable IT line item. Managed IT produces the same number every month, which makes planning possible and removes the temptation to defer a fix because this month already had a big bill.
When break/fix is genuinely fine
For a very small team with a handful of laptops, no servers, and little dependence on uptime, hourly support can be a reasonable choice. The model breaks down as soon as downtime has a real cost or you hold data worth stealing.
The signals it's time to switch
- Downtime is now costing you real money or real customers
- You couldn't absorb a ransomware incident
- You need documented security controls for insurance or clients
- Nobody knows how your environment is actually configured
- You're regularly surprised by IT invoices
Want a second opinion on your setup?
A senior Borg ITS engineer will review your environment and tell you plainly where you stand — no obligation.