The True Cost of Cheap IT Support

Every week or two we quote a business against a competitor who's significantly cheaper. Sometimes we lose. Sometimes the business comes back six months later when the cheap option has broken in predictable ways.

What the cheap quote is hiding

• Limited ticket response times (or wide-open SLAs with no teeth)
• Tier-1 call-center support with slow escalation
• Minimal patch management ('best effort' instead of scheduled)
• No endpoint detection, just basic antivirus
• No backup testing (only backup creation)
• No compliance documentation
• Hourly billing for anything 'out of scope'
• No vCIO or strategic guidance
• Hardware recommendations biased toward vendor kickbacks

The three-year cost

A cheap MSP that saves you $1,000/month looks like $36,000 over three years. That math is compelling — until you factor in the one major incident that wouldn't have happened with a better provider. A single ransomware event, a single failed compliance audit, or a single extended outage routinely erases any savings and then some.

We've seen businesses lose $250,000+ in one event that a competent MSP would have prevented for a fraction of that in monthly fees. The math there isn't subtle.

The lower-bound question to ask

Every quote should answer: what happens if this goes wrong? A provider with real SLAs, real insurance, and real references can answer. A low-bid provider often can't, or points to fine-print limitations.

Cheap support is rarely actually cheap. It's deferred cost. Sometimes the deferral is forever — you luck out. More often, you pay later, in bigger lumps, at worse times.