What should IT cost per employee? Real benchmarks

Ask five business owners what they pay for IT and you'll get five numbers that can't be compared. One pays a nephew in gas money. One pays $250 a head and couldn't tell you what's inside it. One pays nothing until something breaks, then pays a lot, all at once, at the worst possible time. Here's how to actually run this math.

Per employee, per device, per what?

Most managed IT is priced per endpoint — each computer or server covered — or per user. A user with a desktop, a laptop, and email is one user but two or three endpoints, so the two models produce very different totals for the same office. Neither is wrong; you just can't compare a per-user quote to a per-endpoint quote without converting. For an anchor: our own core plan runs $189 to $229 per endpoint per month. A ten-computer office lands around two grand a month. That's the honest shape of the number when everything is actually included.

What the number has to include

The benchmark question isn't what's the price. It's what's inside the price. A real managed plan should cover, without asterisks:

• 24/7 security monitoring by actual humans — a SOC — not just software that emails alerts nobody reads
• EDR on every machine, the tool that catches ransomware behavior instead of just known viruses
• Backups that get tested with real restores, not a green checkmark someone assumes is true
• A help desk your staff can call without a bill appearing every time they do
• Patching, email security, and the compliance paperwork your insurance carrier keeps asking about

Strip any of those out and the price should drop a lot — because you are now self-insuring the scary part.

Why the cheap number is usually the expensive one

Around Florida you'll see managed quotes ranging from well under $100 per endpoint to $250 and up. That spread isn't negotiation room; it's inclusion. The low quote isn't a deal — it's a different product wearing the same name, and what's missing is almost always the security layer or the tested backups: the two things that decide whether a bad day costs you an afternoon or a month. The do-nothing plan isn't free either. It's your office manager playing IT admin between actual duties, plus downtime nobody ever invoices you for, so it never shows up in the budget — just in the payroll and the missed work.

So the honest benchmark: count your endpoints, not your employees, and price the full list above in writing. If a quote comes in dramatically under the going rate for all of it, you're not looking at a discount. You're looking at a shorter list.

Cyber Alamo publishes its pricing because we're tired of the mystery: $189–$229 per endpoint per month, everything above included, on Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, or Proton. If you want a second opinion on what you're paying now — or on what you're not getting for it — book the free assessment. Bring your invoice. We'll translate it line by line.