At some point every growing business asks: do we hire an IT person or outsource it? Both are legitimate answers — but owners usually compare them wrong, because a salary and a service contract hide different costs.
What an IT hire actually costs
A capable sysadmin in South Florida runs $70,000–$95,000 in salary. Add payroll taxes, benefits, PTO coverage, training, and the tooling one person needs (monitoring, ticketing, backup licensing), and the loaded cost lands near $110,000–$130,000 a year — call it $9,000–$11,000 a month.
For that you get one person, eight hours a day, five days a week. Servers do not fail on that schedule. Your hire also gets sick, takes vacations, and — the part nobody budgets — eventually quits, taking the passwords and the undocumented knowledge with them.
What the same budget buys in managed IT
A 10-person office on our Professional plan runs roughly $900–$1,300 a month — about one-eighth of the loaded hire. For a company to reach the point where a full managed plan costs what one hire costs, it typically needs 80–100+ devices under management, which is roughly a 50-person company. Below that line, the math is not close.
Coverage is the other half: a managed provider is 24/7 by structure, not by heroics. Monitoring does not take vacations, and documentation lives in a system, not in one employee's head.
When in-house genuinely wins
Honest answer: when your business runs specialized software that needs daily hands-on ownership (a manufacturing floor, a lab), when hardware physically breaks daily (warehouses are brutal), or when you are past ~50 employees and IT requests are constant. At that size, the right answer is usually a hybrid anyway.
The hybrid most owners overlook: co-managed IT
If you already have an IT person, the choice is not either/or. Co-managed IT keeps your hire for the daily hands-on work and adds our monitoring stack, security tooling, backup verification, and escalation depth behind them. Your person stops being a single point of failure, and you skip the cost of building enterprise tooling for one operator.
We offer this under the same per-device pricing as our standard managed IT plans — the free assessment will tell you which fits.
Trying to decide for your own headcount? Bring us your device count and we will do the math with you — free, in writing, no pressure.