The 7 fees hiding in your current IT contract

The monthly number on an IT contract is the number they want you comparing. The real price lives in the paragraphs nobody reads out loud — the ones that only activate when you're having a bad day and can't say no. Here are the seven we find most often when owners hand us their current agreement to translate.

The seven

1. The after-hours multiplier. The quote covers 8 to 5. Your server, unfortunately, prefers to die at 7 p.m. Evenings, weekends, and anything labeled emergency bill at time-and-a-half or double — the fine print quietly turns your worst nights into their best margins.

2. That's a project. Anything beyond a quick fix — a migration, a new hire's full setup, a security cleanup — gets requoted as separate project labor. The monthly fee covered less than you thought. It covered tickets, not outcomes.

3. The per-ticket cap. Some plans include a set number of help-desk tickets or hours, then bill per incident. Your staff figures this out fast and stops reporting small problems — which is precisely how small problems get promoted to large ones.

4. Security as an upsell. EDR, 24/7 monitoring, email filtering — listed as available add-ons. Meaning the base price you compared quotes on doesn't include the part that stops ransomware. That's not a plan with options. That's a car with the airbags sold separately.

5. Hardware and software markup. Buying laptops and licenses through your provider is convenient, and convenience sometimes carries a markup nobody mentions. Ask to see the distributor invoice, or at minimum price one laptop yourself as a spot check. The reaction to the question is data all by itself.

6. Onboarding's evil twin: the exit fee. Leaving costs money — transition services, data export charges, hourly rates to hand over the passwords to your own systems. If admin credentials and documentation aren't contractually yours from day one, you're not a client. You're a hostage with a payment plan.

7. The auto-renewal cliff. Sixty or ninety days' notice to cancel, or the whole term renews itself. Miss the window by a week and you're in for another year. Put the notice date in your calendar the same day you sign anything.

How to read your own contract tonight

Open the PDF and search for these words: additional, excluded, per incident, renewal, upon termination. Twenty minutes with ctrl-F beats an hour with a salesperson. Anything that surprises you, ask them to strike or cap it in writing. Reputable providers will. The ones who won't have just answered a different question. While you're in there, find the hourly rate that applies once any of the seven trigger — that number, not the monthly fee, is what your worst week gets billed at.

Cyber Alamo charges $189–$229 per endpoint per month with the security, help desk, tested backups, and after-hours coverage inside the number — because we think the fine-print business model deserves to die. Book the free assessment and bring your current contract. We'll mark up all seven for you, free, even if you decide to stay put.