The short version
Break-fix means you call when something is broken and pay by the hour. The provider makes money when your business is down. Managed IT means a flat monthly fee covers monitoring, maintenance, security, and support, so the provider makes money when your business is up. That difference in incentive explains almost everything else in this comparison.
Side by side
| | Break-fix | Managed IT | | --- | --- | --- | | How you pay | Hourly, after something breaks | Flat monthly fee per user | | What's included | The repair you called about | Monitoring, patching, security, help desk, backup, planning | | Response time | Whenever the technician is free | Committed, measured, usually minutes | | Who notices a problem first | Your staff | The monitoring system, often before anyone notices | | Security | Whatever was installed last time | EDR, email security, MFA, training, managed firewall, maintained | | Backups | If someone set them up once | Monitored daily, restores tested on a schedule | | Documentation | Rarely exists | Inventory, credentials, and plans kept current | | Compliance (HIPAA, FTC Safeguards) | Not addressed | Built in, with evidence | | Budgeting | Unpredictable; worst in bad months | Known monthly number, projects quoted in advance | | Best for | Very small offices with no sensitive data and no downtime cost | Any business where an outage or a breach costs real money |
What break-fix actually costs
The hourly rate is the visible part. The invisible parts are the ones that add up: the afternoon the front desk couldn't check patients in while someone drove over, the server that failed because nobody saw the disk warnings for three months, the ransomware that got in through a workstation that hadn't been updated since it was unboxed, and the cyber insurance renewal that came back with exclusions because nobody could say MFA was enforced.
A break-fix provider isn't doing anything wrong by not preventing those. You didn't pay them to. That's the model.
What managed IT actually costs
A flat monthly fee per user, and in our case security is included rather than sold separately. In a quiet year the total can be higher than a lucky break-fix year. Over three years it's reliably lower, because the expensive events mostly don't happen, and the ones that do are recovered from in hours instead of days. What that number typically looks like in Sarasota.
The question that decides it
Ask yourself what one full day without your systems costs. For a dermatology practice, a dealership, a law firm, or a CPA firm in March, the answer is usually more than a year of managed IT. If a day down would be an inconvenience rather than a loss, break-fix may be fine for now.
Where co-managed fits
If you have an internal IT person, the choice isn't binary. Co-managed IT keeps them in the day-to-day and adds the monitoring, security, and after-hours coverage one person can't provide.
Our position, stated plainly
We don't offer break-fix. Not because it's always wrong, but because we've cleaned up after it too many times to sell it with a straight face. If you're in the "break-fix is fine for now" category, we'll tell you so during a free assessment and point you to a sensible setup.