Honest Comparison
Internal hires, MSPs, break-fix, DIY — every path to "IT support" trades something off. Here's where each one actually lands, and why the shared-team model doesn't force the usual choice between what you can afford and what you actually need.
Most options force a choice: pay more for real expertise, or pay less and accept the risk. Here's how the common paths stack up — and why that tradeoff isn't actually a law of nature.
Most advice on this topic treats it as a binary choice — pay more for real partnership, or pay less and accept the risk. That math changes when the cost is shared across many organizations instead of carried by just one.
No option here is a bad choice for everyone — but each comes with real, well-documented tradeoffs worth knowing going in.
Strengths: Deep bench of specialists, genuine strategic capability, brand-name credibility.
Trade-offs: Priced for enterprise budgets. Minimum engagement sizes exclude most SMBs entirely, and frameworks are often built for companies far larger than yours.
Strengths: Dedicated, on-site, and deeply familiar with your business day to day.
Trade-offs: One person can't be equally strong in networking, security, cloud, and architecture. Full salary and benefits cost regardless of workload, and it's a single point of failure when they're out or move on.
Strengths: Broader coverage than a single hire, with a predictable contract.
Trade-offs: Ticket-queue model with rotating techs who don't know your environment. Revenue often depends on selling hardware and licenses — which creates bias, even with good intentions.
Strengths: Can offer competitive pricing on the hardware or software itself.
Trade-offs: The business model is moving product, not managing risk — so advice is naturally shaped by what they sell, and ongoing support is an afterthought.
Strengths: No ongoing contract — you pay only when something breaks.
Trade-offs: Purely reactive by design. No proactive maintenance, no strategic input, and costs spike unpredictably exactly when something big fails.
Strengths: Free or nearly free, and personally trusted.
Trade-offs: No accountability, no documentation, no depth on security or compliance — and it's already a side task on top of their actual job.
Strengths: No added cost beyond subscriptions you already pay for.
Trade-offs: Owner or staff time gets diverted from the actual business, default security settings are often left as-is, and there's no strategic oversight behind the decisions.
Strengths: A full team of specialists — network, security, cloud, architecture — for less than the cost of one generalist hire, on a fixed monthly rate that doesn't move when your technology does.
Trade-offs: You're trusting a shared team rather than one person who thinks about nothing but your business. We offset that the way any good partnership does — by staying embedded in your environment long enough to know it as well as an internal hire would.
Enterprise-grade leadership, without the enterprise price tag or the reactive risk. That's the entire point of the math.
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