How much does outsourced IT support cost a small business?

How much does a per-user plan cost?

Market prices fall into three tiers. We cross-checked them against the price lists published by dozens of managed service providers (MSPs) and our conversations with many providers.

Over a year, for an entry-level plan at €30, covered devices at €65 and a premium plan at €110:

Regulated industries, such as finance, sometimes go as high as €150 per user.

The price mostly pays for support technicians. On an entry-level plan at €30, the tools used to manage client IT setups account for about €6. The rest pays for the time support spends handling requests by hand.

Beware of teaser prices: some plans advertised very low only cover machine monitoring or the device inventory. Nobody answers when an employee is stuck.

What gets billed on top of the plan?

In France, the entry-level plan is cheap and the rest is billed on top. In the United States and the United Kingdom, it's the other way around: support, security and backups are included from the start, in a plan that rarely goes below $100 per user, per month (our overview of the market). The cheapest French price looks low, but it covers only part of what you need, and quality of service follows price. In the price lists we collected, a few items are most often left out of the plan:

• Microsoft 365 backups: Microsoft does not back up its customers' email and files.
• Managed security: an antivirus monitored by the provider costs €10 to €35 per user on its own.
• Some update processes: we've seen a few MSPs bill separately for a Windows update when it didn't install automatically.
• Access management, employee onboarding and offboarding: setting up a new hire's computer, opening and then closing their accounts in each online tool. It's billed on top, and often poorly covered. At a startup of around a hundred people we met, the incumbent provider didn't handle it, so the team did it themselves.
• On-site visits: around €100 an hour.
• Servers, additional machines and setup fees.

Add €5 for backups and €20 for managed security to a €30 plan: the cost per user rises to €55. Before the first on-site visit, that comes to €33,000 a year for 50 users, €66,000 for 100 users and €99,000 for 150 users. That €55 still includes neither onboarding and offboarding nor on-site visits. At an accounting firm we spoke with, the office administrator described this pattern: a plan around €30, then interventions billed on top, creating friction with the provider. Extra billing included, a full plan comes to more like €80 to €100 per user.

And how much does handling IT in-house cost?

First option: hire an IT person. Current job listings and the Michael Page salary guide put a support technician at €26,000 to €35,000 gross a year, and a systems administrator at €45,000 to €60,000. With employer social contributions, a technician at €30,000 gross costs about €45,000 a year. The usual benchmark is one support person for every 70 users: you need one at 50 users, two at 100 or 150 users. And when they're on vacation, nobody takes over.

Second option, the most common below that threshold: the office manager or HR handles IT on top of their own job. Job listings often spell it out: "manage and track the IT equipment," "be the point of contact for everyday IT issues." Three to five hours a week adds up to more than €7,000 a year of their salary. Meanwhile, requests wait until they're free and their own work falls behind. It isn't their job, so each request takes them longer than it would a technician. And when new hires and departures pile up, they're quickly overwhelmed: the cost climbs, and so does the productivity loss, for them as well as for new hires waiting for their computer. In companies with 10 to 50 employees, it's actually the CEO who handles IT half the time, according to Cybermalveillance. Here again, needs aren't fully covered and the devices are hard to keep secure and productive.

The costs you don't see in the quote

The monthly price is only part of the contract. The most common commitment term is 12 months, renewed automatically, often after a 3-month trial. Some contracts run as long as 36 months, sometimes tied to equipment leasing.

In some disputes ruled on in recent years, this is what costs the most. In September 2026, the Paris Economic Activities Court (tribunal des activités économiques) ruled against a client committed for 36 months who thought they had canceled everything by email: they lose their claim for a €26,002 refund (ruling of September 11, 2026). For 50 users at €30, leaving in the middle of a 36-month contract means paying 18 months for nothing, or €27,000. For 150 users, €81,000.

Also look at the notice period, what is handed back when you leave (access, documentation) and the clause that raises the price every year.

How do you compare two quotes?

Ask each provider the same four questions, and put the answers side by side.

If a provider can't answer one of these questions in writing, you have your answer.

What Vauban costs

At Vauban, we want to bring more transparency to this market, so our prices are fully public:

• €15 per user, per month for Helpdesk: day-and-night monitoring of computers and servers, automatic updates, remote control, requests 24/7 via Slack, Teams, email or phone, picked up within 2 minutes, security vulnerabilities patched, device inventory, portal and monthly report, recovery of your access from your previous provider.
• €25 for the Onboarding and Offboarding plan, Helpdesk included, with access management: computer ready on day one, accounts opened on arrival and closed on departure, machine locked and wiped remotely, an up-to-date list of who has access to what.
• €50 for the Cybersecurity plan, everything above included: next-generation antivirus with alerts handled 24/7, email protected against fraud, backups of computers and of Microsoft 365 or Google.

That's €15 to €50 per user, and each price is all-in. The contract can be canceled with 3 months' notice.

For the same coverage, Vauban costs less. For 50 users, the full plan comes to €30,000 a year, versus about €54,000 for a full market plan at €90, extra billing included. The gap grows to €48,000 for 100 users and €72,000 for 150 users. The Onboarding and Offboarding plan comes to €15,000 a year for 50 users, less than an entry-level plan at €30 (€18,000) that doesn't include it.

Helpdesk is proactive: we step in as soon as a warning sign appears, before anything fails. What falls outside the plan is written down, line by line: on-site visits, by a field partner we've selected, and training. They appear separately on the invoice, and only after your written approval.

To get the exact price for your company, run the numbers in our simulator: vauban-it.fr/en/pricing.