HOW MUCH DOES IT SUPPORT COST —
THE INDICATIVE RANGE IN AUD.

As a rule of thumb, fully managed IT is commonly quoted at roughly $35 to $300 per user per month in Australia, and the spread is almost entirely about scope. An Essential tier that covers monitoring, patching and a reactive business-hours helpdesk sits at the lower end; a Premium tier that adds managed security monitoring, after-hours response and included project work sits at the top. Break-fix hourly support, where nothing is paid until something breaks, commonly runs around $120 to $220 per hour. These are indicative market ranges, not a quote: the real number depends on user count, how complex the environment is, the security posture required and the response times promised.

On a quiet month, break-fix looks cheaper because there is no retainer. The catch is that break-fix pays only to fix things after they break: there is no proactive monitoring or patching, response is slower, and the monthly bill is unpredictable. Per-user managed IT charges a fixed fee to keep problems from happening, which usually costs less over a year once a few incidents, a security scare or a day of downtime are priced in. As a business grows past a handful of staff, or once it holds data worth protecting, the fixed-fee model tends to win on both cost and risk. This calculator lets both models be modelled side by side.

The tier sets what core support covers. Essential keeps the lights on: around-the-clock monitoring, managed patching, a reactive business-hours helpdesk and baseline endpoint protection. Standard adds faster, defined response targets, a security baseline aligned to the Essential Eight starting point, Microsoft 365 administration and identity management, and monthly reporting. Premium is fully managed: priority and after-hours response against service levels, managed security monitoring and incident response, virtual CIO input with a technology roadmap and project work included, plus proactive lifecycle and vendor management. Each tier in the calculator carries its own indicative per-user range.

A per-user managed fee typically covers the service itself: monitoring, patching, helpdesk, identity and security work at the level the tier sets, and reporting. What it usually does not include is hardware, software licensing (Microsoft 365 seats are billed separately), and one-off projects such as a server migration, a network refresh or a security uplift. Those are scoped and quoted on their own. The calculator estimates the recurring support cost and leaves capital and project costs out on purpose so the monthly figure stays honest.

They are Australian managed-IT market ranges, not Frontrow prices and not a published rate card. Managed IT pricing varies widely by provider, business size and the service levels agreed, so a single average would be misleading. The bands exist so the model produces a sensible figure on first load and so a business can sanity-check a quote it has already received. The right next step is a scoped quote against the actual environment.

Managed cyber security, managed backup, cloud and Microsoft 365 management and after-hours support are priced as monthly per-user line items on top of core support, and they apply on either the managed or break-fix model. Each carries its own indicative per-user range in the calculator, so ticking one lifts both the monthly and annual figures by that band times the number of users. Many Australian businesses buy managed backup and managed cyber security regardless of the core model, because data protection and security monitoring are hard to run reliably on an ad-hoc basis.