Side by side
| Break-fix IT | CAL IT Group Managed Care | |
|---|---|---|
| How you pay | Hourly or per incident, after the fact | Flat $179 per user / month for your first 100 users, then $149 for each additional user — no onboarding fee |
| Budget predictability | Unpredictable — a bad month means a big invoice | The same bill every month; projects are fixed-fee and quoted in advance |
| Provider incentive | Paid more when things break | Paid the same either way — rewarded for preventing problems |
| Monitoring & patching | Usually none | 24×7×365 NOC & SOC monitoring and automated patching |
| Response | When a technician is available | Service desk staffed 5 AM–6 PM; real engineer response on every email ticket within 20 minutes |
| Security | Whatever you buy and maintain yourself | Best-of-breed security stack included |
| On-site visits | Billed by the hour, often with a trip charge | Included — we never bill extra time for your existing environment |
| Documentation & planning | Rarely | Full documentation, vCIO & vCISO strategy and a technology roadmap |
The hidden cost of break-fix
The invoice is the smallest part. The bigger cost is downtime: employees who can’t work while they wait for a technician, missed deadlines and frustrated customers. Break-fix also leaves the work that prevents outages — patching, monitoring, backups and security — undone until something fails. By then, the fix is usually more expensive than the prevention would have been.
Security is the biggest risk. Ransomware, phishing and stolen credentials don’t wait for a service call. Without continuous monitoring and endpoint protection, an attack can spread for days before anyone notices. Many cyber insurance applications now ask about controls like MFA, EDR and backups — the things managed IT puts in place by default.
When break-fix can work
Break-fix can make sense for a very small office with a handful of computers, no sensitive data and a high tolerance for downtime. Once your business depends on its systems every day — or handles client, financial or health data — the risk and unpredictability usually outweigh the savings.
Making the switch is painless
Moving from break-fix to managed IT doesn’t mean disruption. Our 60-day onboarding plan documents your environment, deploys monitoring and security in observation mode first, and builds your long-term plan with weekly meetings along the way.
- No onboarding fee — there’s no upfront cost to switch.
- Longer hours — our service desk is staffed 5 AM–6 PM, not 8 to 5.
- On-site support included — no hourly or trip charges.
- Published, flat-rate pricing — estimate yours in seconds.
Also see managed IT vs. in-house IT, our questions to ask an MSP, or download our service overview (PDF).