Outsourced IT for Chicago businesses
An IT department for under a third of the salary.
Hiring one IT person costs about $121,600 a year once you add payroll tax, insurance and time off — and you still only get one person, who takes holidays. Outsource the whole function to us for a flat monthly fee instead.
No three-year contract. Prices published on this site. Same-business-day callback.
What are you actually paying?
Move the two numbers. The maths is done in your browser — nothing is sent anywhere.
- Hiring in-house, per year
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- —
- Outsourcing to us, per year
- —
- —
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- $149
- per computer, per month — everything included, published on the pricing page
- 30 days
- notice to leave. We keep you by being worth keeping, not by locking you in
- Same day
- callback on every enquiry, on-site the next business day
- Chicago
- based and covered — The Loop, West Loop, River North and out
The case for outsourcing
You are not comparing a salary to an invoice.
You are comparing one person to a team — and a salary is never just the salary. Here is the honest version, including where hiring in-house genuinely wins.
| One full-time IT hire | Outsourced to us | Call-a-guy-when-it-breaks | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost per year | $121,600$95,000 salary + 28% burden | $35,76020 seats at $149/mo | UnpredictableYou only call when it is already broken |
| Hours actually covered | 40/week, minus holidaysOne person, one calendar | Mon–Fri 8–6, plus after-hoursNobody is ever the only one who knows | Whenever they can fit you in |
| Cover for holiday and sickness | None — you are down | Built in | n/a |
| Depth of skill | One generalistGreat at some of it, guessing at the rest | Server, network and security specialistsWhoever the job needs | Varies by who is on the van |
| Monitoring and patching | If they get to it | Automated and reported monthly | Not included |
| Recruiting, reviews, turnover | Yours to handleAnd to repeat in 18 months | Not your problem | Not your problem |
| Tools, licensing, training | You buy it allOften several thousand a year | Included in the seat price | Billed back to you |
| Scaling down when it is quiet | Redundancy process | Change the seat count | Just stop calling |
| Notice to leave | — | 30 daysNo three-year lock-in | — |
Salary figure reflects published Chicago-area averages for a systems administrator — $91,608 on ZipRecruiter, $103,214 on Salary.com — which is the going rate downtown for one person who can cover both helpdesk and infrastructure. A pure support specialist is cheaper ($59,244 statewide on Indeed) but cannot run your servers. The 28% burden covers payroll tax, health insurance, workers’ comp, paid time off, and the laptop and tooling they need. Your own numbers will differ; the calculator above uses whatever you type in.
The salary is the small part
Payroll tax, health cover, workers’ comp, paid time off, a laptop, monitoring software, licences and training. Budget roughly a third on top of whatever you offer, before anyone has fixed anything.
One hire is one point of failure
The person who set up your server is on a beach in July when it dies. They are also the only one who knows the passwords. A team has no single point of failure and no handover problem.
Most of the work is not full-time
Patching, backup checks and monitoring take hours a week, not forty. You end up paying a full salary for part-time work, or hiring someone junior enough to afford and senior enough to be dangerous.
When we will tell you to hire instead
Past roughly 60–70 computers, or if you run software specific enough that someone needs to live inside it, an in-house person starts to make sense. At that point the honest answer is to hire one — and we are happy to be the team behind them rather than instead of them. We would rather say that on the first call than eighteen months in.
Two ways in
Businesses and households need different things.
Most local IT sites blur the two together and serve neither well. Pick the one that is you.
Outsource your IT department
Flat monthly fee per computer. We become the IT function: helpdesk your staff can ring, servers watched around the clock, patches applied, backups tested, security handled.
- Unlimited helpdesk for your staff
- 24/7 monitoring on servers and network
- Patching, antivirus and backup included
- A named engineer who knows your setup
- Quarterly review in plain English
From $149 per computer per month, minimum 5 computers. Servers $349/mo.
How outsourcing works →Just fix the thing
No contract, no monthly anything. A laptop that will not boot, a printer nobody can reach, Wi-Fi that dies in the back bedroom, a machine that has been slow for two years.
- $89 diagnostic, credited if we do the work
- $185/hour on-site, billed in 15-minute blocks
- $145/hour remote when it can be fixed remotely
- We tell you when a machine is not worth repairing
Full list on the pricing page. No trip charge downtown or in the near suburbs.
Computer repair →Services
Everything an in-house hire would cover.
Outsourced IT Department
A full IT team for less than one salary.
Read more →Managed IT Services
Monitoring, patching, helpdesk, flat monthly.
Read more →Computer Repair
Home and small office, on-site or bench.
Read more →Networks & Wi-Fi
Cabling, switches, wireless that reaches.
Read more →Servers & Cloud
Windows Server, Microsoft 365, migrations.
Read more →Backup & Recovery
Local plus off-site, tested restores.
Read more →Cybersecurity
Endpoint protection, email, staff training.
Read more →Getting started
Three steps, no sales sequence.
A free network evaluation
We walk your site, inventory what you actually own, and find what is unpatched, unbacked-up or about to fail. You get a written summary whether or not you hire us — it is yours to keep.
A fixed number
Seat count times seat price, plus servers. One page, no per-ticket surprises, no minimum term beyond 30 days’ notice. If outsourcing is the wrong answer for your size, we say so here.
Onboarding in about a week
Monitoring agents deployed, backups verified, documentation written, your staff given a number that a person answers. Your existing IT provider or in-house person keeps working while we transition.
Coverage
We work downtown.
The central business district and the neighbourhoods around it, where a support call means a lift and a loading dock rather than an hour on the Stevenson. No trip charge anywhere on this list, and we keep certificates of insurance current for building management so access is never the thing holding up a fix.
- The Loop
- West Loop
- River North
- Fulton Market
- Near North
- Streeterville
- Gold Coast
- South Loop
- Old Town
- Lincoln Park
- Wicker Park
- Bucktown
- Logan Square
- Pilsen
- Lakeview
- Ravenswood
FAQ
Questions we get asked
Is outsourcing IT actually cheaper than hiring someone?
For most businesses under about 60 computers, comfortably. One IT hire costs roughly $121,600 a year once payroll tax, insurance, workers’ comp and paid time off are included, before the laptop and software they need. Outsourcing the same coverage for a 20-computer business runs about $35,760 a year at our published seat price.
The saving is only part of it. You also stop carrying the recruitment, the turnover risk and the single point of failure that one employee represents.
What is the catch with a flat monthly fee?
That it only makes sense above a certain size — below 5 computers hourly support is cheaper for you, and we will tell you that rather than sell you an agreement. Project work such as server replacements and migrations is also quoted separately, because it is capital work rather than support.
Do you lock people into long contracts?
No. Thirty days’ notice either way. Long terms exist mainly to protect providers from their own service quality.
We already have one IT person who is overwhelmed. Can you help without replacing them?
Yes — that is co-managed support, and it is often the right answer between roughly 40 and 80 computers. We take the recurring monitoring, patching, backup and after-hours load, and your person gets to do the work you actually hired them for.
Do you work with home users too?
Yes, on an hourly basis with no contract — a diagnostic, a firm price, and an honest answer about whether a machine is worth repairing. See the computer repair page.
Why are your prices on the website when nobody else's are?
Because you are trying to answer a budget question, and making you sit through a meeting to learn a number wastes your afternoon. If our pricing is wrong for your business you should be able to find that out in thirty seconds.
How quickly do you respond?
Same-business-day callback on every enquiry, next-business-day on-site for routine work, and remote support usually starting within the hour. Managed clients get out-of-hours response on genuine outages, with monitoring running continuously.
Work out whether outsourcing beats hiring.
Bring your seat count and the salary you had in mind. We will tell you honestly which one wins for a business your size — including when it is not us.