Transparent Managed IT Pricing in Los Angeles.
We are not the cheapest. We are honest about that. We are also honest about what our competitors charge, what we charge, and why. Read the math below.
Most IT firms make their margin where you cannot see it.
Microsoft 365 licensing is the cleanest example. The wholesale cost of a Microsoft 365 Business Premium license, at the time we are publishing this page, is around $22 per user per month. The retail price Microsoft posts is $26.40. A typical IT firm will bill it to you at somewhere between $40 and $80 per user per month, and they will not break out the markup on the invoice. We have seen firms bill at $220 per user per month for the same license. The markup is between 200 and 1,000 percent. The IT firm benefits. You do not.
Hardware is the second hiding place. A small business firewall that wholesales at $1,200 will land on your invoice at $2,400 or $3,600 without any change order, without any explanation, and without anybody mentioning to you that the rest of the industry usually marks it up between 50 and 100 percent. The math is the math. The disclosure is the choice.
The third hiding place is the labor on top of the products. Every “managed IT” agreement has a labor component, and a substantial fraction of IT firms have learned to slice the labor into categories that get billed separately from the monthly fee. A project. A change request. An after-hours support call. The original monthly number looks fine. The actual cost is the original number plus the surcharges, which you find out about two quarters in.
Three numbers we disclose.
Hardware: twenty percent over cost. The same firewall the rest of the industry sells at fifty to a hundred percent markup, we sell at twenty. We will send you the distributor invoice with our invoice attached. You can verify it.
Microsoft 365 licensing: wholesale cost plus a flat per-seat administration fee. Currently $4 per user per month, separately itemized. The license cost is the license cost. The administration is a real labor cost for keeping your tenant configured, your users provisioned, and your data backed up. We charge for it because it is work. We do not hide it in the license markup.
Managed IT services: a single per-seat monthly fee, with included scope clearly defined. Helpdesk, vendor coordination, security stack, on-site support across the territory, backup management, monitoring. Projects outside the monthly scope are quoted separately and approved by you before we start. There are no surprise change orders. The quote is the quote.
What is included, what is extra, and why.
Most managed-IT contracts try to hide complexity in the per-seat number. We separate the per-seat number from the project work and disclose both.
Per-seat monthly fee
Helpdesk, monitoring, security stack, vendor coordination, on-site support during business hours across the territory. Flat. Per user. Per month.
After-hours support included
Real after-hours coverage for the firms that need it. A managing partner calling at 9 p.m. on a Tuesday is not getting an extra invoice for the answer.
Hardware at twenty percent over cost
Disclosed. Documented. Invoice from the distributor and invoice from us. The math is auditable.
Microsoft licensing at wholesale + flat fee
License cost passed through. Administration fee per seat per month, separately itemized. No license markup.
Projects quoted separately
Hardware refreshes, office moves, platform migrations, M&A integration. Quoted in writing before we start. Approved by you. No surprise change orders mid-project.
Onboarding is the work
The first ninety days of a new client are heavy. We document everything, audit the existing environment, and set up the security stack. The onboarding fee is real because the work is real.
There is always a cheaper option.
We have lost prospects to firms quoting half our price. About a third of those prospects have come back within eighteen months. The reasons are predictable: the lower price did not include the work they actually needed, the security configuration was performative, the response times degraded after the first quarter, or the firm sold the contract to a private equity roll-up and the people they trusted left.
We are not trying to win the cheap-price market. We are not the right answer for a firm shopping on price alone. We are the right answer for a firm that has run the math on what an outage actually costs them, what a breach actually costs them, and what it costs to be paying for managed IT a second time after the first vendor did not deliver.
If you want the math for your specific firm, we will run it. The first conversation costs nothing.
They picked up the phone on a Sunday night when our server went down before a Monday board meeting. I have not seriously thought about our IT in eight years. That is the value.
If your IT firm has not called you back, we should talk.
Tell us what is going wrong. We will tell you whether we can help, what it would cost, and what we would do first. No pressure, no contract on the first call.