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 an 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 an owner with their hands on it daily (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, and 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.