In-house vs managed IT
Hiring IT, or thinking about it? Here is the real math
Bringing IT in-house feels cheaper and more in your control, and on the salary line it can look that way. But the salary is only about 70% of the real number, and one person covers about a quarter of the week. Here is what an in-house help desk actually costs, line by line, next to flat per-user managed IT.
When you hire one internal person, you are buying a pair of hands, not a system. They can remote in and fix what you tell them about, but without monitoring, automated patching, and real ticketing behind them, they only ever see the problems that have already become your problem. You are paying a full salary to be reactive.
That is the part the salary number hides. A managed team comes in with the monitoring, patching, and tooling already wired in, so most issues get caught and closed before anyone files a ticket. For the same money or less, you stop finding out about problems from your own staff.
What one in-house technician really costs
A single Tier 1 help desk hire in Phoenix, fully loaded.
Excludes recruiting and onboarding, commonly another $15,000 the first time you hire. Running a desk 24/7 is not one hire: continuous coverage needs three to six technicians, putting base labor alone north of $150,000 a year.
At 25 users
One in-house business-hours tech runs about $5,442 a month. Our Trailhead managed-IT bundle at the same size is $3,984 a month.
You pay less, you get a whole team instead of one person, the monitoring and patching tools are included, and you can move up to 24/7 coverage, none of which one hire can give you.
Side by side, by team size
In-house figures are fully-loaded labor. Trailhead is our IT-floor bundle; Ridgeline adds the full security stack an in-house desk usually does not have at all.
| Users | In-house techs | In-house / mo | DLS Trailhead / mo | DLS Ridgeline / mo |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 25 | 1 | $5,442 | $3,984 | $5,784 |
| 50 | 2-3 | $10,884 - $16,326 | $7,844 | $11,387 |
| 100 | 2-3 | $10,884 - $16,326 | $14,940 | $21,690 |
| 150 | 3-6 | $16,326 - $32,652 | $22,410 | $32,535 |
| 200 | 6-8 | $32,652 - $43,536 | $27,556 | $40,006 |
| 300 | 6-8 | $32,652 - $43,536 | $38,097 | $55,310 |
A lean in-house team can look cheaper on the salary line at larger sizes, but that number assumes business-hours-only coverage, no after-hours, and none of the monitoring, patching, or security tooling. That gap is the whole point.
What the salary number leaves out
Coverage
A 24/7 desk and a real on-call path, instead of one person’s 40-hour week. Nights, weekends, and vacations are covered.
No single point of failure
A team and documented systems, so coverage never depends on one person staying, getting the flu, or remembering how something works.
Tooling included
Monitoring, patching, RMM, and ticketing are in the per-user price, not a separate one to two thousand a month, and not skipped.
Zero marginal cost per ticket
Every internal ticket carries a real loaded cost of roughly $15 to $40. With flat per-user pricing, a busy month costs the same as a quiet one.
Security comes attached
An in-house help desk is just support. Ridgeline and Summit wrap MDR, endpoint protection, identity, backup, and awareness training around the desk.
Scales without re-hiring
Add users at the per-user rate. Growth is a smooth line, not the step function of recruiting and onboarding another technician.
Already have an IT person?
Most of our clients keep theirs. We take the password resets and printer tickets off their plate so they can do the project work you actually hired them for, and we give them the monitoring, patching, and security tooling no single person can run alone. We are leverage for your team, not a replacement for it.
See how augmentation worksWhere these numbers come from
In-house costs are market ranges, not point estimates. DLS pricing is from our current published catalog.
- Phoenix Tier 1 salary
- Robert Half, Salary.com, ZipRecruiter, Glassdoor, Indeed (Help Desk Technician, Phoenix AZ)
- Labor burden rate
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employer Costs for Employee Compensation (ECEC)
- Cost per resolved ticket
- MetricNet / HDI service-desk benchmarks, ManageEngine, Supportbench, GHD Systems
- Internal RMM / PSA and remote tooling
- Syncro, aiMultiple, Splashtop published pricing
Let us run your actual numbers
Tell us your team size and what your IT looks like today. We will show you the real side-by-side and a written quote, with no obligation.
Call (855) 737-9500 / (480) 573-3349
Email [email protected]
15-minute response on critical issues, 24/7. Onboarding in two to three weeks.