There's a moment every growing business hits, usually around the 50 to 100 person mark, where IT stops being something one helpful person handles on the side. Suddenly you need a real decision: hire someone, or bring in outsourced support. We break down the real costs, the risks nobody mentions, and the hybrid option most SMEs don't even know exists.
There's a particular kind of dread that sets in when the person who "sort of does IT" for your business goes on holiday. Suddenly nobody knows the wifi password, the printer's jammed, and someone's locked out of the shared drive with no idea who to call. If that sounds familiar, you've probably hit the point where informal IT support stops working.
For businesses in the 50 to 100 person range, this usually comes down to two options: hire your first dedicated IT person, or outsource to a managed IT support provider. Both can work. But they cost different things in different ways, and most of what you read online is written by people trying to sell you one or the other. So let's just look at the numbers and the trade-offs honestly.
What does an in-house IT hire actually cost?
On paper, hiring feels simple. You post a job, you pay a salary, done. In practice, the salary is only part of it.
A reasonably experienced IT generalist or junior IT manager in the UK typically costs somewhere in the £30,000 to £45,000 a year range, before you add employer National Insurance, pension contributions, and any training they'll need to keep their skills current. Then there's recruitment cost if the first hire doesn't work out, which happens more often than people admit. And there's the software and tools they'll need just to do their job properly, monitoring tools, ticketing systems, licences.
Here's the part people really don't think about until it bites them: one person means one set of skills and one point of failure. Your new IT hire might be brilliant with networking but shaky on cyber security. They might be excellent day to day but have no experience handling a serious incident, because most in-house IT people simply haven't seen one yet. And when they're on holiday, or off sick, or they leave for a better offer six months in, you're right back where you started.
What does outsourced IT support cost per user?
Managed IT support is usually priced per user, per month, and in the UK that typically lands somewhere between £30 and £75 per user depending on what's included. Basic support with a helpdesk and monitoring sits at the lower end. Add cyber security, backup management, and strategic IT planning, and you're further up the range.
For a 75-person business, that might work out to somewhere between £2,000 and £5,500 a month, which sounds like a lot until you compare it against a full-time salary plus all the extras above, spread across a team that already has the specialist skills covered.
The key thing to check, and most providers won't volunteer this unless you ask, is what's actually included versus what gets billed separately. Out-of-hours support, project work, and cyber security add-ons are common places where the headline price and the real price diverge.
Coverage and response time, the bit people underestimate
This is the real difference. One in-house person, however good, cannot be an expert in networking, cyber security, cloud infrastructure, and hardware troubleshooting all at once. Outsourced support spreads that across a team, so when something specific goes wrong, you're not relying on one person's best guess.
Picture this: it's 6pm on a Friday and someone gets a ransomware alert. With one in-house IT person, best case they're still in the building and know what to do. Worst case, they've already left, and now you're calling round trying to find anyone who can help before the weekend does real damage. With an outsourced team that includes out-of-hours cover, that alert goes straight to someone whose job is exactly this, at 6pm on a Friday just as much as 11am on a Tuesday. That's not a hypothetical for us, it's a fairly normal Friday.
When in-house genuinely makes more sense
To be fair to the other side of this, there are situations where hiring makes sense. If you're running very bespoke, deeply customised systems that need someone physically present most days, or if your business is large enough to justify a full internal team rather than one generalist, in-house can work well. It's not that outsourcing is always right, it's that for most businesses in the 50 to 100 person range, one hire genuinely can't cover what a specialist team can.
The hybrid option most SMEs don't know exists
Here's the bit that rarely gets mentioned: you don't have to choose one or the other. Co-managed IT support means keeping an internal person for day-to-day, desk-side stuff, the things that need someone physically there, while outsourcing the specialist work and out-of-hours cover to a managed provider. It's a genuinely good middle ground for businesses that already have an IT hire but want proper backup and specialist support behind them.
Is outsourced IT support cheaper than hiring?
In most cases, yes, once you account for the full cost of a salaried hire including training, cover, and tools, outsourced IT support tends to come out cheaper for businesses in the 50 to 100 person range, while also covering more specialist ground.
The bottom line
There's no universal right answer here, but there is a right answer for your business. If you're weighing this up right now, it's worth actually running the numbers on your own situation rather than going on gut feel. We're happy to walk through it with you.
FAQs
Is outsourced IT support cheaper than hiring in-house? Usually, once you factor in the full cost of a hire (salary, training, cover, tools), outsourced support tends to work out cheaper while covering more specialist ground, though it depends on your specific setup.
Can outsourced IT support replace an internal IT manager entirely? Yes, for most businesses in this size range, a managed provider can cover everything an internal generalist would, and usually with broader specialist skills across the team.
What happens if we outsource and it doesn't work out? A good provider will have a clear off-boarding process and won't lock you into anything difficult to exit. It's worth asking about this before you sign anything.
How fast do outsourced IT teams typically respond to issues? This varies by provider and by how serious the issue is, but most managed IT contracts include defined response times by severity level, which is worth checking closely.