Break-Fix vs Managed IT Services: Which Actually Costs Less?
North Star sells both. We do hourly break-fix work at $95 per hour and we run managed IT plans priced per user per month. That means we have no reason to pretend one model always wins. Here is the honest math, with our real published rates, so you can decide which fits your business.
Break-fix is cheaper until the year it isn't.
Break-fix means you call someone when a thing breaks and pay by the hour. Managed IT means a provider, usually an MSP, takes ongoing responsibility for your systems for a flat monthly fee. In a quiet year, break-fix costs a fraction of a managed contract. In a bad year, one ransomware incident or dead server can cost more than several years of managed service, and break-fix does nothing to make that bad year less likely.
So the real question is not "which is cheaper" but "what does downtime cost you, and how likely is it." For a two-person shop that could run on paper for a week, break-fix is often the rational choice. For a 10-plus person organisation that stops when email stops, it usually is not. The numbers are below.
The six criteria that actually decide it.
These are the dimensions we ask prospective clients to think through. Rates shown for break-fix are North Star's real published rates, not estimates.
| Criterion | Break-fix | Managed IT |
|---|---|---|
| How you pay | $95/hr standard, $143/hr emergency, $720 day rate | Flat $100 to $250 per user per month |
| Provider incentive | Provider earns more when you have more problems | Provider earns more when you have fewer problems |
| Monitoring and patching | None between visits; issues found when they hurt | Continuous monitoring, scheduled patching included |
| Security baseline | Whatever was set up last time, slowly drifting | EDR, MFA, backup verification maintained as standard |
| Cost predictability | Spiky; quiet months then a five-figure incident | Budgetable to the dollar per user |
| Accountability | Starts when you call, ends when the invoice is paid | Someone is responsible before anything breaks |
You break it, we bill it. Simple, and that is the appeal.
Break-fix is pay-as-you-go IT. Something stops working, you call, a technician fixes it, you get an invoice. At North Star that means $95 per hour for standard work, $143 per hour for emergencies, and a $720 day rate for planned full-day jobs. On-site travel from Prince George runs $0.85 to $1.05 per kilometre. No contract, no retainer, no monthly commitment.
The strengths are real: zero fixed cost, no lock-in, and you only pay for work you can see. The weaknesses are structural. Nobody watches your systems between calls, patches are not applied, backups are not tested, and the first sign of trouble is the failure itself. Break-fix responds to incidents, at emergency rates, in whatever order the provider's queue allows. It never prevents them. And in northern BC, if your break-fix tech is a solo operator on vacation the week your server dies, you wait.
A flat fee to keep things from breaking in the first place.
Managed IT is a subscription. In the BC market it typically runs $100 to $250 per user per month depending on what is included. North Star offers three tiers, Essentials, Professional, and CIS-Aligned, published on the pricing page. The fee covers helpdesk, continuous monitoring, patch management, endpoint detection and response, backup with verified restores, and email security. Higher tiers add compliance alignment and strategic planning. Most new clients also pay a one-time onboarding fee to get the environment documented and up to baseline.
The trade is obvious: you pay every month whether or not anything breaks. What you buy is prevention, fast response, and a predictable line item instead of surprise invoices. Recurring outages, growing security worries, or an IT person who has become a bottleneck are the classic signs you have outgrown break-fix.
Be honest about who profits from what.
Break-fix has a conflict of interest baked in: the provider's revenue goes up when your systems go down. A break-fix shop that hardened your network properly would be cutting its own future income. Most technicians are honest, but the model rewards firefighting over fire prevention, and over years that shapes behaviour.
Managed IT flips the incentive, and flipping it creates a different failure mode. Under a flat fee, a bad MSP profits by doing as little as possible: collect the payment, keep the monitoring agent installed, hope nothing happens. That is why reporting matters more than any sales promise. A real provider shows you patch compliance, backup test results, and resolved tickets every month, in writing. No evidence, no managed service, just a subscription to good intentions. Ask for a sample report before you sign. We show ours in every free assessment.
A 10-person shop: quiet year vs bad year.
Assumptions stated so you can swap in your own numbers. Break-fix uses our published rates. Managed uses $130 per user per month, a mid-range figure from our tiers.
Quiet year, break-fix. Ten staff generate roughly three hours of support a month: a printer, a password reset, a flaky switch. That is 36 hours at $95, or $3,420 for the year. Managed at $130 per user would cost 10 × $130 × 12 = $15,600. Break-fix wins the quiet year by about $12,000, and any provider who tells you otherwise is selling something.
Bad year, break-fix. Same baseline of $3,420, then ransomware lands or the server dies. A realistic small-business recovery: 40 hours of emergency work at $143 ($5,720) to contain, rebuild, and restore what backups exist, plus four full days at the $720 day rate ($2,880) rebuilding workstations and reconfiguring. Labour totals $12,020. Add roughly $6,000 for replacement hardware. Then the quiet cost: four working days of downtime for 10 people at a loaded $30 per hour is 10 × 8 × 4 × $30 = $9,600 in payroll producing nothing, before a dollar of lost revenue or a single unhappy customer. Total: about $27,600, and that assumes the backups actually restore. Nobody was testing them.
Same bad year, managed. The plan still costs $15,600. The incident is less likely to happen at all, because patching, EDR, and MFA close the doors ransomware usually walks through. If it happens anyway, recovery labour is covered by the plan and restore comes from image backups that were tested monthly, so downtime is measured in hours, not days. One bad year roughly pays for two years of the managed plan, and bad years are exactly what break-fix cannot prevent.
What break-fix can never give you, at any hourly rate.
Some things cannot be bought by the hour because they only exist as ongoing processes. Monitoring: a technician who visits monthly cannot see the disk that started failing on day three. Patching: unpatched systems are the most common way ransomware gets in, and patching only works as a schedule, not a visit. A security baseline, meaning MFA everywhere, EDR on every endpoint, and backups that get test-restored, decays without maintenance. And accountability before failure does not exist in break-fix at all. With an hourly provider, you are the project manager of your own outage. With an MSP, the outage is their problem, contractually.
Compared on hourly cost alone, break-fix looks unbeatable. Compared on what you are actually buying, they are different products. One is repair. The other is responsibility. The same distinction matters when weighing an MSP against hiring internally, covered in MSP vs in-house IT.
Who should pick what.
Small team, low IT dependence
One to four people, few critical systems, and you could work around a dead computer for a day or two. Project-only needs fit here too: a one-time migration, a network build, a new office fit-out. Paying $95 per hour as needed is the rational call, and North Star does this work happily with no retainer and no upsell pressure.
Downtime costs real money
Five or more staff who depend on email, files, and line-of-business software all day, anything with compliance or cyber-insurance requirements, or a history of surprise IT invoices. A flat monthly fee that keeps the bad year from happening is cheaper than the bad year. See our managed services and published tiers.
Start where you are
We are one of the few providers that publishes both rate cards. Use us hourly, judge the work, and move to managed if and when the math says so. Founding pricing applies to managed clients who sign before September 1, 2026. Start with a free assessment to see which side of the line you are on.
Moving from break-fix to managed, step by step.
If the numbers point at managed, the path is short. First, a free assessment: we inventory your environment and hand you the findings whether or not you sign. Second, a quote: a per-user monthly price against a defined tier, plus a one-time onboarding fee covering documentation, agent deployment, and the security baseline. Third, onboarding, typically two to four weeks, riskiest items first. Nothing you spent on break-fix is wasted; working systems carry straight over, and project work at day rates stays available for anything out of scope. If your current provider resists handing over admin credentials and documentation, that alone tells you what you needed to know.
Common questions about break-fix vs managed IT.
Is break-fix always cheaper for a small business?
No, but it often is for very small ones. With one to four staff, few critical systems, and tolerance for a day or two of downtime, paying $95 per hour as things break usually totals less than a managed contract. The math flips as headcount, IT dependence, and the cost of an outage grow. For most 10-plus person organisations, one bad incident erases years of break-fix savings.
What do North Star's hourly rates include?
Our published labour rates outside managed plans are $95 per hour standard, $143 per hour emergency, and a $720 day rate for planned full-day work. On-site travel is billed at $0.85 to $1.05 per kilometre. There is no retainer required. What hourly work does not include is monitoring, patching, backup verification, or any responsibility for your environment between visits.
Why does managed IT cost $100 to $250 per user per month?
The fee covers labour plus tooling: monitoring agents, patch management, endpoint detection and response, backup licensing, email security, and helpdesk. Basic helpdesk-and-patching plans sit near the bottom of the range. Plans with 24/7 security monitoring, compliance alignment, and vCIO planning sit near the top. North Star publishes its tiers on the pricing page so you can see exactly where the money goes.
How do I know a managed provider is actually doing the work?
Demand evidence. A legitimate MSP sends regular reports showing patch compliance, backup test results, tickets resolved, and security events handled. Ask to see a sample monthly report before you sign. A provider that cannot show what it did last month, in writing, probably did not do much. That is the best single filter for separating real managed service from a monitoring agent nobody watches.
Can we start with hourly work and move to managed later?
Yes, and it is a sensible path. Many of our managed clients started hourly, which let them judge our work on small jobs with no commitment. When downtime starts costing more than prevention would, we run a free assessment, quote a per-user price, and onboard you. Nothing you paid for hourly is wasted; the documentation carries forward.
Does managed IT eliminate hourly charges completely?
Mostly, not entirely. Day-to-day support, monitoring, patching, and covered incidents sit inside the flat fee. Out-of-scope projects, such as an office move, a new server build, or custom software, are quoted separately. A good agreement states plainly what is in and out of scope, so ask for that list before signing.
Not sure which side of the line you're on?
Book a free 30-minute assessment. We will look at what downtime actually costs your business, show you our real reporting, and tell you honestly if break-fix is still the right call for you. Sometimes it is.
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