The alternative to hiring
Everything an IT hire does. None of the $121,600.
Outsourcing your IT function means you stop paying a salary, payroll tax, insurance and holiday cover for one generalist — and start paying a flat monthly fee for a team. For most Chicago businesses under about 60 computers, it is not close.
What it costs
$149 per computer per month, $349 per server per month, minimum 5 computers. Thirty days’ notice. The evaluation is free and the written findings are yours to keep.
What “outsourcing IT” actually means here
It means we do the job you were about to write a job description for. Your staff get a number to ring when something breaks. Your servers get watched at three in the morning. Your patches get applied on a schedule instead of when someone remembers. Your backups get tested rather than assumed. Somebody who is not you decides when the ageing switch in the closet needs replacing, and tells you a month before it fails rather than the morning after.
The difference from hiring is that none of it depends on one person being at their desk, well, and still employed by you.
The number most people miss
A $95,000 salary is not a $95,000 cost. Add employer payroll taxes, health insurance, workers’ compensation, unemployment insurance and paid time off, and the loaded figure lands near $121,600. Then add the things that person needs to do the job at all: a laptop, remote-access and monitoring software, antivirus licensing, a ticketing system, and a training budget so they do not fall behind. Several thousand a year, comfortably.
Outsourcing the same coverage for a 20-computer business runs about $35,760 a year at our published rate. That is under a third, and it includes the tooling — because we already own it and spread it across every client.
The saving is real, but it is the second-order effects that clients tell us about later: no recruiting, no performance managing someone whose work you cannot evaluate, and no eighteen-month rehiring cycle when they leave for a Chicago salary you cannot match.
What you give up, honestly
We are not in the room. Someone in-house absorbs context by osmosis — they overhear that the warehouse system is being replaced, they know which director hates being called. We get that through structure instead: documentation, a named engineer who stays on your account, and a quarterly review sat at your table. It works, but it is deliberate rather than automatic, and it is fair to call that a trade.
You also give up instant physical presence. Our commitment is same-business-day callback and next-business-day on-site, with remote help usually starting within the hour. If your business genuinely cannot survive twenty minutes without someone standing at the rack, that is an argument for in-house, and we will say so.
Co-managed: keeping your person and adding a team
Plenty of businesses land in the middle. You have one capable person who knows your industry, and they are drowning — because they are also the backup administrator, the security team and the person who resets passwords.
Co-managed IT puts our monitoring, patching, security tooling and after-hours cover behind them, and hands them the boring recurring work. They get to do the projects you actually hired them for. It is priced the same way, per seat, and it is often the right answer between about 40 and 80 computers.
What is included at the seat price
Unlimited remote helpdesk for your staff. On-site visits for anything that cannot be fixed down the wire. 24/7 monitoring and alerting on servers, switches and firewalls. Operating-system and third-party patching on a tested schedule. Managed antivirus and endpoint protection. Backup monitoring with quarterly test restores. Microsoft 365 administration — new starters, leavers, mailbox problems. Asset inventory kept current. A quarterly review in English, not acronyms.
Servers are $349 per month each on top, because they need genuinely more attention than a desktop. Minimum 5 computers. Everything is on the pricing page — we are not going to make you sit through a discovery call to learn a number.
FAQ
Questions we get asked
How does this compare to just hiring someone part-time?
Part-time works if the work is genuinely part-time and predictable. The problem is that IT is not: it is quiet for three weeks and then a server dies on a Friday. A part-time hire is not there on the Friday, and they still cost you the tooling and licensing that we already own.
If you have found a good part-timer, co-managed support behind them is usually a better structure than replacing them.
Do we have to sign a long contract?
No. Thirty days’ notice, either direction. Long lock-ins exist to protect the provider from its own service quality, and we would rather not need one.
What happens to our current IT person or provider?
If you have an in-house person, co-managed support usually keeps them and takes the recurring load off them. If you are leaving another provider, we run the transition while they are still engaged so there is no gap — we take over documentation, licensing and monitoring in a planned order, typically across a week.
Is there a size where outsourcing stops making sense?
Yes. Somewhere around 60 to 70 computers the arithmetic starts to favour a full-time hire, and past that it clearly does. We will tell you where you sit on that line during the evaluation, and if the answer is ‘hire someone’, that is the answer you will get.
Can you handle our industry's specific software?
We handle the infrastructure it runs on — the server, the database, the backups, the network, the workstations — and we manage the relationship with your software vendor when the problem is inside their application. What we will not pretend is that we know your practice-management or shop-floor system better than the vendor does.
What does the free network evaluation actually involve?
A walk of your site, an inventory of what you own, a check of what is patched, backed up and licensed, and a look at the network and firewall. You get a written summary of what we found and what we would do about it, in priority order. It is yours whether or not you hire us.
Bring your seat count and a salary figure.
Ten minutes on the phone is usually enough to tell you whether outsourcing or hiring wins for a business your size.