Small business IT support, priced where you can see it.

// What it costs

Small business IT support pricing.

Indicative pricing ex GST, based on current Sydney market rates. Your fixed quote comes after a free consult, and it is the number you pay.

Essentials vs Complete, side by side.

Both plans are built from the same inclusions list. Here is what each one covers, line by line, so you can compare them against each other and against anyone else's quote.

Complete is the tier most five to fifty seat businesses land on. Essentials suits a team that mostly needs someone competent watching. Hardware, licences and projects sit outside both, quoted separately and at cost.

// Scope

What a plan actually covers.

The word "managed" gets used loosely. Here is what is inside ours, and just as importantly what is not.

• Helpdesk. Your people email or ring when something breaks. Essentials covers remote support; Complete makes it unlimited and adds on-site visits.
• Monitoring and patching. Machines and servers are watched for failing drives, missed updates and the errors that show up weeks before an outage does.
• Security baseline. Multi-factor authentication, sensible admin rights, endpoint protection and mail authentication that actually passes.
• Backup checks. A backup nobody tests is a rumour. Restores get verified, not assumed.
• Vendor management (Complete). We ring the internet provider, the software vendor and the printer company so your staff do not have to.
• Documentation. How your systems fit together, written down, and yours to keep if you ever leave.

Not included, deliberately: hardware and software licences are billed at cost, and large projects such as a cloud migration, an office move or a new server build are scoped and quoted separately. Rolling those into a monthly fee is how providers end up quietly rationing the work.

// Onboarding

Onboarding, in order.

Onboarding is the audit and documentation pass, from $550 one-off, charged once at the start so the monthly fee is not padded to hide it. Here is what happens during onboarding, in order. Nothing switches on a Friday.

• Audit and documentation. We record what you actually have before anything changes: machines, network, licences, backups, and the one weird thing every site has. How your systems fit together gets written down, and the documentation is yours.
• Credentials into your name. Domains, the Microsoft 365 tenancy, licences and DNS move into accounts you own. If a previous provider stalls on this step, that is the reason to start it early.
• Security baseline. Multi-factor authentication on email, endpoint protection on every machine, sensible admin rights, patching switched to a schedule, and mail authentication that passes.
• Quick wins. The failing drive the monitoring found in week one, the backup that was never restoring, the shared mailbox that went quiet. Fixed while they are still warnings, not outages.
• The first report. A plain-English summary of what was found, what was fixed and what is queued, so you can see what the fee is buying. From there it is the rhythm: helpdesk in business hours, patching on schedule, backups checked, and a plain-English report so you can see what the fee is buying.

If you want the full day-one checklist and the questions to ask any provider before signing, they are in the buyer's guide to choosing a managed IT provider.

// Where

Remote first, on-site across Sydney.

Remote is the default because it is faster for you and cheaper than a callout, not because you are far away. Most faults never need anyone in the room: email, software, sync, server and cloud administration, security, monitoring and backups all get fixed in a secure remote session while you watch.

The honest limit is short: hardware, cabling, WiFi coverage and anything physically broken needs hands. For those, the on-site area with travel included covers Penrith and the Nepean, Parramatta and Greater Western Sydney including Blacktown, Castle Hill and Mount Druitt, and the CBD and inner west. Northern, southern and eastern Sydney are covered by arrangement, with timing agreed when the job is booked.

• Reply within one business hour, Monday to Friday, 8:30am to 5:30pm.
• Remote fixes usually start the same day, once we have triaged what is actually wrong.
• On-site visits are typically within a day or two, booked at a time that suits you.
• A stopped business jumps the queue. Server down, whole office offline or a suspected security incident goes ahead of routine work.
• Staff at home count too. A home worker is a remote session like anyone else. The usual weak point there is the internet and WiFi rather than the laptop, and we will say so when that is the actual fault.

The full suburb list, and why there is no guaranteed arrival time on it, is on the service areas page. The Western Sydney detail, heat, mixed NBN technology and storm-season power, is on the IT support Penrith page.

// The typical setup

Ten staff, one server, a phone system: the typical setup.

The business this page is written for usually looks like this: five to thirty people, a mix of laptops and a couple of desktops, Microsoft 365 for email and files, one server or NAS in a cupboard doing the file share or the line-of-business app, a phone system, a printer everyone hates, and a set of passwords that live in one person's head. Here is what usually breaks in it.

• Software and sign-in problems. Outlook disconnected, OneDrive not syncing, the endless sign-in loop, a shared mailbox nobody can see. Fixed remotely, usually the same day, and most of them are setup faults that stop coming back once the setup is right.
• A worn drive or a dead power supply. Both are cheap when caught early, which is what monitoring is for, and expensive when caught by the outage.
• The internet dropping and taking the cloud with it. If phones and files are all in the cloud, the connection going down stops the business. That argues for a second connection that fails over, and a UPS on the gear that matters so a power blip does not corrupt a database mid-write.
• The backup that was never restoring. A backup nobody has restored from is a hope, not a backup, and it is the single most important line on the plan.
• Email going to spam, or a fake invoice arriving that looks real. Mail authentication fixes the first. Multi-factor authentication on email and a call-back habit before paying a changed bank account stop most of the second.

Which plan fits: at ten staff with a server, Complete usually pays for itself, because the server needs patching, monitoring and backup, and the on-site visits and vendor calls are the part you were doing yourself. At five people with no server and everything in Microsoft 365, Essentials or ad-hoc is the honest answer. The four things that actually matter on any plan, and the upsells to walk away from, are in managed IT services for small business: what you actually need.

// Co-managed

Working with your existing IT person.

Plenty of businesses already have someone: a capable staff member who is not actually an IT person, a one-person contractor who has become a single point of failure, or a bigger provider that handles part of it. None of that has to change to work with us. We can take the monitoring, patching and backup checks and leave the rest with them.

• Audit first. Onboarding starts with an audit and documentation pass from $550, and the documentation is yours whoever does the fixing.
• Backstop for a contractor. If your IT is one person, the risk is the week they are unreachable. A plan with the documentation in your name means the business does not stop when they do.
• Reviewing a contract yourself. What a real IT support SLA looks like and what a fair managed IT contract looks like are the yardsticks.

The rule either way: the documentation, licences, domains and admin passwords end up in your name. Not ours, and not theirs.

// The difference

Most IT shops resell licences. We build the things.

It is a fair question to ask what your provider can actually do when the problem is not in a vendor's knowledge base. The honest answer for a lot of the market is: raise a ticket with someone else. Here is what sits behind this business instead, and every one of these has a build write-up on this site you can read before you ring.

• Infrastructure we run ourselves. Self-hosted servers, monitoring and automation, not just a reseller portal. See self-hosted business tools and server cluster or cloud.
• Data and video recovery. Failed drives, corrupted arrays and camera footage that a normal IT shop hands to a lab. This is unusual capability for a provider this size and it has saved real businesses real money.
• Sensor networks and IoT. Live LoRaWAN deployments doing long-range monitoring. See IoT farm monitoring and the soil moisture system.
• Networks built, not just plugged in. Routers and firewalls configured from the ground up, including this build, plus proper WiFi site surveys.
• Security that has seen a real attack. Read a day in the life of a server under attack. That is production traffic, not a brochure.

None of that is a reason to pick a provider on its own. It matters because when something genuinely strange happens to your systems, the question is whether the person you pay can go one level deeper, or has to shrug.

// The honest bit

You might not need a plan.

A monthly plan earns its keep when downtime costs you money, when you have enough staff that small problems arrive constantly, or when you have compliance obligations that need someone accountable. If you are five people who ring for help twice a year, a plan is worse value than ad-hoc support at $140 an hour, and we will say so at the consult rather than after you have signed. The maths usually flips somewhere between eight and twelve staff, but it depends on how much your systems have to work rather than how many people use them.

// Questions

Small business IT support, your questions answered.

// Pairs well with