What Managed IT Actually Costs in The Woodlands in 2026 — A Real Number, Not a Range

Most Houston-area MSP websites will not show you a price. They will show you "starting at" or "contact us for pricing" or — worst — a quiz that gates the number behind your phone number. The reason is rarely complexity. The reason is that the price varies by what they think you can afford, and getting on a call before you see a number is how that conversation goes.

This post is the opposite of that. It's the actual managed-IT pricing for businesses in The Woodlands and the surrounding area as of 2026, with the line items most MSPs hide — what they pay their vendors, what they mark it up to, and what we charge instead.

The headline number: $125 per user per month

Mako Logics' standard managed-IT rate for a Woodlands business is $125 per user per month. That number gets you the full operations stack — comprehensive support, 24/7 monitoring, patching, EDR, dark-web monitoring, security awareness training, vendor management, the client portal, after-hours on-call for criticals, and quarterly vCIO reviews. It is not a teaser rate. It is what a 30-person law firm in Town Center pays. It is what a 60-person construction office in the Research Forest pays. The work load varies; the per-user number does not.

For comparison, the Houston-area MSP market in 2025 ran roughly $150–$220 per user per month for the same scope of work. That spread came mostly from where the MSP buys their stack and how aggressively they mark it up. We will get to those numbers below.

What you do not pay extra for

These are the things that have a habit of showing up on Houston MSP invoices as "additional services":

• Onboarding fee. We don't charge one. The first 30–60 days are part of the engagement, not a separate project.
• After-hours on-call for genuine emergencies. Included.
• Patching, monitoring, EDR. All included — and the EDR is real EDR (ThreatDown, monitored 24/7), not the cheap antivirus a lot of MSPs sell as "endpoint protection."
• Microsoft 365 administration. Adding users, removing users, enforcing MFA, license cleanup — operational, included.
• Quarterly strategy review. Two hours of vCIO time, every 90 days, in person if you're nearby. Included.

What you do pay extra for

In the interest of not pretending everything is a flat rate when it isn't:

• Servers are billed separately because the management cost scales with the server, not the user count. Three tiers, all flat per-server-per-month: $275 for a basic server (file/print, light database), $400 for a standard production server (Windows Server with line-of-business apps), $600 for a high-touch server (SQL, multiple roles, regulated workloads).
• Microsoft 365 licenses are billed at vendor pass-through. We don't mark them up. If Microsoft charges $22/user for Business Standard, you pay $22.
• Net-new hardware (new laptops, switches, firewalls) is sold at our cost plus a fixed procurement margin we'll show you on the quote. We are not a hardware sales channel; we don't survive on hardware markup, and we will tell you when we think you should buy direct from the vendor instead of through us.
• Project work outside the recurring scope — a network rebuild, a new-office buildout, a Microsoft 365 tenant migration — is quoted separately. Time-and-materials or fixed-bid, your choice.

That's the full list. There is no "premium tier" gated behind "contact us for enterprise pricing." If a Woodlands business with 80 employees is paying us $125 per user per month plus $400 for one production server, that's $10,400/month — and that is the entire managed-IT line item on their books.

The line items most Houston MSPs mark up — and what they actually pay

Here is where this post earns its keep. The following are the wholesale costs of common items in a managed-IT stack, and the typical retail markup the Houston market charges. These are not estimates pulled from an analyst report; they are what we pay the vendors, validated against quotes we have seen from competitor MSPs in 2024–2025.

EDR (endpoint detection and response)

• What we pay: $5–$8 per endpoint per month, depending on volume.
• Common Houston MSP retail: $18–$30 per endpoint per month.
• Markup: 200–500%.

EDR is one of the worst categories for hidden margin. Most MSPs buy it through a distributor at the volume rate and resell to clients at the boutique rate. We pass it through at our cost, plus a small management fee that's already inside the $125/user.

Microsoft 365 licenses

• What we pay (Microsoft direct via the CSP program): the published Microsoft price, in USD, monthly billing.
• Common Houston MSP retail: 10–25% over Microsoft's published price.
• Markup: 10–25%.

For an 80-user Business Standard tenant, that markup is $2,500–$6,500/year of pure margin going to the MSP for clicking buttons in Microsoft Partner Center. We don't take it. You pay what Microsoft charges. The amount we make on M365 for an 80-person Woodlands client is zero dollars.

Backup (Acronis, Datto, Veeam Cloud Connect)

• What we pay: $40–$80/server/month for Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud (depends on storage size).
• Common Houston MSP retail: $150–$250/server/month.
• Markup: 200–400%.

We disclose backup as a line item when the storage volume warrants it, but for most Woodlands clients the small-to-medium server backup is folded into the $275/$400/$600 server tier — not a separate $200/month invoice line.

Spam filter (Proofpoint, AppRiver, Mimecast)

• What we pay: $2–$4/user/month.
• Common Houston MSP retail: $8–$15/user/month.
• Markup: 200–400%.

Same pattern. We've stayed with AppRiver because their spam filter has the best false-positive rate we've measured for the kind of email a Houston-area professional firm gets, but we do not mark it up. AppRiver pays us a small partner commission; we disclose that on the pricing page. It does not influence the recommendation.

Why the markup happens

Three reasons, in order of how much money is at stake:

1. The MSP business model in 2010–2020 was built on hardware and software margin, not labor. Recurring services were a side dish. As cloud ate the hardware market, the margin stack shifted entirely to software pass-through. Most MSPs never updated their pricing model, so they're now charging 2024 software margin on top of 2024 labor.
2. It is invisible to most buyers. A small-business owner who has never been quoted EDR before has no reference price for "how much should EDR cost." The MSP knows this. The number on the invoice is whatever the MSP thinks the buyer will accept.
3. Renewals are sticky. Once a client is on a stack, switching is painful. The renewal becomes the moment to push prices, because the cost of a switch is high and the price increase is on a per-user-per-month basis that doesn't look like much.

What this means for The Woodlands buyers

A few practical things:

1. Ask for a line-item invoice. Not a single-line "Managed Services" with one number. Ask for the M365 line, the EDR line, the backup line, the server line. If the MSP refuses, that is the answer.
2. Compare on stack, not on bottom line. A $90/user/month MSP with 200% markup on $40/user of stack is more expensive than a $125/user MSP with zero markup on $25/user of stack. The bottom line is the same, but the stack is dramatically different.
3. Price for the office you have, not the office you might have someday. Most Woodlands businesses are between 15 and 80 employees. The MSP that wants to charge you $200/user/month is selling you the platform they sold to a 400-person client. You don't need it.
4. Contracts. We require 1, 2, or 3-year terms — and we say so before you sign. The reason: vendor pricing on the stack is materially better at one- and three-year commitments, and we pass that through. Anyone offering month-to-month is either pricing in a lock-in cost (you'll pay it on the per-user rate) or going to nickel-and-dime you on the renewal.

The honest comparison: when we are NOT the right MSP

This is the section every transparency post needs. We are not the right MSP for:

• Sub-10-employee shops. The fixed costs of doing this well don't amortize across that few users; you'll get more for your money from a competent local break-fix shop.
• Pure-cloud SaaS startups with no infrastructure. You need someone who specializes in identity and SaaS governance, not someone who runs servers.
• Businesses where the budget is the only criterion. If the call ends with "what can you do for $50/user/month," we will tell you we cannot do it well at that number, and we will recommend someone who tries to.

What to do next

Two doors:

• You want to talk pricing for your specific situation. Schedule a 15-minute discovery call. We'll quote real numbers in plain English.
• You want more reading first. The pricing page has the full breakdown including server tiers and the partner-commission disclosure. The areas/the-woodlands page covers what we do specifically for Woodlands businesses.

If you read another Houston MSP's pricing page after this one and notice it doesn't have a number on it — that is information.