Paying a monthly fee for IT support when nothing is broken feels, to a lot of business owners, like paying for rain insurance in a drought. You call someone when something breaks, they fix it, you pay for the visit: what could be more sensible? That model is called break-fix, it served small businesses for decades, and the case against it is not that it stopped working but that the sums and the incentives quietly turned against the businesses using it. This page lays both models out honestly, including the cases where break-fix is still the right answer.
The two models, plainly
Break-fix is transactional: no contract, no monthly fee, and when something fails you call an IT firm who charges by the hour or the visit, commonly £75 to £150 per hour for reactive callout work in the UK. You pay nothing in a quiet month and whatever it takes in a bad one.
Managed support is a subscription: a flat monthly fee per user (typically £50 to £85 at the standard tier, per the full pricing guide) buys unlimited day-to-day support plus the parts you cannot see: monitoring, patching, backup checks, security tooling, and the strategic reviews that keep the estate deliberate rather than accumulated. The MSP explainer covers the model in full.
The surface difference is billing. The real difference is what each model pays its provider to want.
The incentive problem nobody mentions on the invoice
Follow the money in each model and you find opposite motivations:
- A break-fix firm earns money when your IT fails. Not through villainy; simply structurally. Prevention is unbillable, recurring faults are recurring revenue, and the firm’s best customer is a business with fragile systems and no monitoring. Even a scrupulously honest break-fix firm has no mechanism to be watching your backups on the Tuesday nothing broke.
- A managed provider earns the same fee whether you call or not, which makes your quiet month their best month. Prevention stops being a cost centre and becomes the business model: the provider is financially motivated to patch, monitor and harden precisely so the phone does not ring.
We hear the objection from prospects regularly: “we hardly ever have problems, so monthly cover would be wasted on us.” It contains its own answer. Businesses that hardly ever have problems either have someone quietly doing the prevention already, or they are describing the run of luck before the server morning that converts them. Low fault counts are an output of maintained IT, not a property of lucky IT.
What break-fix actually costs
The hourly rate is the visible cost. The full price of the model has four more lines:
- Downtime while you wait. Break-fix means no contracted response times: you join the queue behind the firm’s contracted clients, at emergency rates if it is urgent. Staff standing idle cost more per hour than any engineer.
- Bigger faults, caught later. Nobody was watching the disk fill up, the backup silently failing since March, the Windows updates not applying. Break-fix problems arrive fully grown because the model has no early-warning layer.
- Security is nobody’s job. Patching cadence, MFA coverage, EDR monitoring: the controls insurers and Cyber Essentials now demand are continuous activities. A per-incident relationship has no one performing them, which is why break-fix estates increasingly fail insurance questionnaires before they fail technically.
- Unbudgetable spend. Quiet months at zero, then a four-figure invoice in a bad one: the pattern that makes IT feel chaotic and defeats any attempt at an honest IT budget.
The crossover arithmetic
The honest comparison is not “monthly fee vs zero”; it is monthly fee vs your realistic annual break-fix spend plus the risk you carry between visits.
A worked shape: a 10-person business at £65 per user pays £7,800 a year managed. The same business on break-fix spends nothing until it does: at £100 to £120 per hour, one bad server incident with two days of downtime can clear £2,000 in labour alone before counting lost work, and a business averaging one incident a month at 4 to 6 hours of billable time is already at £5,000 to £7,000 a year with none of the prevention, security stack or backup verification the managed fee includes. The crossover point is not exotic: roughly one meaningful fault per month, or one serious incident per year, and break-fix is the more expensive model even on cash, before pricing the downtime and the uninsurable security posture.
Below that threshold, the sums genuinely favour break-fix, which brings us to the honest part.
When break-fix is still the right answer
- Very small and genuinely simple: two or three people, cloud-only, no server, no compliance exposure, and tolerance for a day or two of downtime. The managed fee buys little that matters yet.
- Alongside capable internal IT that covers the daily work, with external help for occasional overflow, though at that shape a co-managed arrangement usually fits better than pure break-fix.
- As a stopgap while between providers or evaluating options, with eyes open that nobody is watching the backups meanwhile.
What does not work is the middle: ten-plus staff, real dependency on systems, customer data, insurance questionnaires arriving, and support still structured as “call someone when it breaks”. That shape carries managed-level risk on a break-fix safety net, and it is the shape most businesses reading this page are in.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between break-fix and managed IT?
Break-fix is pay-per-incident: you call when something fails and pay hourly. Managed IT is a monthly per-user fee covering unlimited support plus continuous prevention: monitoring, patching, backup checks and security management. The structural difference is that only one model pays anyone to stop faults before they happen.
Is break-fix cheaper than managed IT support?
For very small, simple, cloud-only businesses with low downtime sensitivity: often yes. For a typical SME, roughly one meaningful fault a month or one serious annual incident makes break-fix the dearer model on cash alone, before counting downtime and the missing security layer.
Why do IT companies push monthly contracts?
Recurring revenue, certainly, but the incentive cuts the customer’s way too: a flat fee makes the provider profit from your systems not failing, where break-fix revenue depends on them failing. Judge any provider on contracted response times and what the fee demonstrably includes, per the contract guide.
Can we mix the two models?
The workable hybrid is co-managed support (internal IT plus an external provider with defined responsibilities). Managed cover for some machines and break-fix for others is generally a false economy: the unmanaged machines share your network and your risk.
What happens to security on break-fix?
It is nobody’s contracted job: patching, MFA enforcement, backup verification and monitoring are continuous tasks with no per-incident trigger. That gap increasingly surfaces as failed cyber insurance questionnaires and Cyber Essentials audits rather than as a technical fault, which is its own kind of expensive.
How do we move from break-fix to managed support?
An audit of the estate, a fixed onboarding period that clears the accumulated faults (the first months are busiest), then steady state. The switching guide covers the sequence, and moving from break-fix is simpler than moving between providers: there is no incumbent contract to unwind.
Price both models against your actual year
The free IT health check gives you the comparison this page can only sketch: your fault history, your downtime cost, your insurance questionnaire and your estate’s current risks, priced under both models. If break-fix genuinely suits your shape, we will say so and you keep the audit. Get in touch and find out which side of the crossover you are on.
