Managed IT vs Break-Fix: how to actually choose

Most IT companies want to sell you the managed plan. It's predictable revenue for us and, sometimes, genuinely the right fit for you. But it's not always the right fit — and pretending otherwise burns customer trust faster than any actual mistake.

Here's how we think about it when a Cape Breton business owner calls us asking "should I be on a managed plan or should I just pay you when things break."

The actual difference between the two models

Break-fix is what it sounds like. Something breaks, you call, we come fix it, you pay for the hours. No monthly bill. No relationship beyond the invoice. Great when things are working fine; expensive and stressful when they're not.

Managed IT is a fixed monthly fee that covers a bundle of things: 24/7 monitoring of your machines and network, proactive patching, endpoint security, backup, and a defined number of support hours per month. The pitch is that problems get caught before they turn into downtime, and you have a predictable IT budget instead of a lumpy one.

Both models make sense. The question is which one makes sense for you.

When break-fix is actually the right answer

We tell business owners break-fix is probably fine if:

• Under 5 computers, no server, no shared drives. The overhead of a monitoring platform doesn't pay off at that scale.
• Downtime doesn't cost you real money. If your business runs fine for a day without one specific computer, the "prevention" premium is hard to justify.
• You have someone in-house who's IT-comfortable. A staff member who can handle a printer jam and knows when to call outside help absorbs a lot of what a managed plan would cover.
• You already have solid backup and security. If those are handled, the biggest risks are addressed without a monthly relationship.

When managed IT actually pays for itself

The math changes fast once one or more of these are true:

• You have a file server, shared drives, or client data that has to survive ransomware. Real backup + endpoint security + monitoring is the difference between "we lost a day" and "we lost the business."
• Downtime costs you money. Retail with a POS system, insurance office with a policy-management system, hotel with a booking system — every hour offline is measurable revenue.
• You have 10+ endpoints across an office or multiple locations. Nobody can eyeball 10+ machines and know which one is about to fail. Monitoring catches the failing hard drive before it takes the machine down.
• You're subject to any kind of compliance or cyber-insurance requirement. Cyber insurance now expects patching, MFA, EDR, and backup as prerequisites. Break-fix doesn't get you there.

The actual cost comparison, honestly

Rough numbers, for a 10-endpoint office:

• Break-fix baseline: zero monthly cost, plus whatever hours you use. If you use nothing, you pay nothing. Average small office uses 2-4 hours of IT work a month, so ~$200/month typical, but with wide variance.
• Managed IT (our Silver tier): $299/month fixed. Includes 4 hours of support, all endpoint monitoring, patching, backup, endpoint security. Additional hours at a reduced rate.

On paper, break-fix looks cheaper. The catch is that break-fix bills you for the crisis — the day the server dies, the day a machine gets ransomware, the day someone accidentally deletes the shared folder. Those days are 10, 20, sometimes 40 hours of billable work, plus lost revenue while it's happening. Managed IT smooths that out and, crucially, tries to prevent it in the first place.

The honest answer: over 3-5 years, managed IT tends to cost about the same as break-fix at the same coverage level, but with a lot less operational risk. The exception is very small offices where the risk is genuinely low — in which case break-fix wins on cost.

What we actually recommend

We happily do both. When people ask, our honest recommendation looks like:

• 1-4 endpoints, no server, no client data — start with break-fix. Revisit if the business grows.
• 5-9 endpoints, or any shared server / client data — managed makes sense at our Starter or Silver tier.
• 10+ endpoints, or any downtime cost — managed is almost always the right call.
• Regulated industry, cyber insurance, or any compliance requirement — managed is table stakes.

If you're not sure which category you're in, that's a conversation worth having. We do free walkthroughs — we count your machines, look at your network, ask what's slow, and give you a straight answer. No pressure to sign up for anything on the visit.