Per user, per device or per hour: how should IT support be priced?

Per user is the fairest default for most small businesses: it follows people, scales predictably, and covers each person's laptop, phone and support needs in one number. Per device suits machine-heavy environments; hourly suits one-off jobs and quietly punishes you for every problem. Our plans are per user: $79 to $199 a month, minimum five users.

If you have gathered three quotes, you have probably met three units, and they cannot be compared as written. One provider quotes per user per month, another per device, a third per hour, and each number is defensible inside its own model. The comparison only becomes real when you force everything into one shape: total dollars per month, for your actual headcount and your actual device count, with the inclusions listed. Do that conversion yourself; whichever salesperson does it for you will do it in their favour. Include everything: the monthly fee, the expected hours outside it, the licences slipped into the plan, the hardware assumptions. Partial conversions produce confident wrong answers.

Per-user pricing works because it tracks the thing owners already track. Hire a person, the IT cost goes up one unit; someone leaves, it goes down one. The person's laptop, phone, accounts and questions all live inside the number, which matters now that almost nobody uses exactly one device. Its weakness is the definition, so pin it down in the contract before signing: a user should mean a person, with their everyday devices included, not a login that quietly meters every gadget separately. It also makes budgeting boring in the best sense: next year's IT line is next year's headcount times a known number.

Per-device pricing is the honest fit for environments where machines outnumber people: warehouses full of scanners, clinics with shared consulting-room PCs, venues with point-of-sale terminals. Its failure mode is creep, because every new printer, tablet and screen becomes a line item, and the invoice grows in ways nobody decided. If your business is mostly people at desks, a per-device quote that looks cheaper usually stops looking cheaper the day you count the devices. A hybrid exists too: people priced per user, with truly shared machines, the point-of-sale terminal, the warehouse scanner, priced as devices, which keeps both halves honest.

Hourly is the unit to treat most carefully, not because it is dishonest but because of where its incentives point. A provider paid by the hour is paid by the problem: the worse your month, the better theirs, and prevention is unbillable. That makes hourly exactly right for defined one-off jobs with a clear finish line, and exactly wrong as the standing way a business keeps its systems healthy. If your current arrangement is hourly and the same faults keep returning, the arrangement is working precisely as priced. The tell is the renewal conversation: hourly relationships argue about last month's bill, subscription relationships argue about outcomes.

Two disciplines protect you at the comparison stage. First, be suspicious in both directions: a quote far under the converted market usually means something was removed, and the Essential Eight gives you a named checklist for finding what; a quote far over it should be able to say what the extra buys. Second, get the exclusions in writing, because hardware, licences and projects sit outside most monthly fees, and the difference between two similar quotes is often hiding there. Ten minutes with a spreadsheet settles what an hour of sales conversation will not.

The honest caveat is that the unit matters less than the scope. A fair, transparent hourly technician beats a vague subscription, and a well-defined per-device contract beats a per-user plan that will not name its security controls. The unit tells you how the price moves; the inclusions tell you what you are actually buying. Judge the second first. Scope also decides what happens on the worst day, because a subscription includes the incident and an hourly arrangement meters it.

Ours, for the record: per user, per month, published on the website rather than behind a quote form, $79 to $199 with the tier set by Essential Eight maturity level and a five-user minimum. If you want to know what needs fixing before you price anything, the Essential Eight Cyber Security Scorecard is free, or call 1800 456 567.