If you call your IT guy when something breaks and pay by the hour, you're running break-fix. It's not a bad system. For the right business, it's cheaper than any monthly plan will ever be. The switch point isn't about how big your company is. It comes down to two numbers: how often you're calling, and what an hour of downtime actually costs you.
How much is break-fix actually costing you?
Most break-fix arrangements run around $150/hour with a one-hour minimum per ticket, and jump to roughly $225/hour if you need someone outside normal business hours. That's not a criticism of the model. It's just labor priced for unpredictable, occasional work.
The problem isn't the hourly rate. It's what happens when "occasional" turns into "every few weeks." A machine shop that calls twice a month for two hours each time is spending roughly $600/month in labor alone, before you count what the machine wasn't running while you waited for someone to show up. That second number, the downtime and not the invoice, is usually the bigger one. It's also the one break-fix doesn't touch at all. Break-fix fixes what already broke. It does nothing to stop the next thing from breaking.
What's the real break-even point?
Here's the honest version, no hedging: if you're calling for break-fix more than once a month, or if an hour of downtime costs your business more than $500, a monthly plan almost certainly pays for itself. Below that, it often doesn't. We'll tell you that if you ask.
A 15-person machine shop with six CNC-adjacent workstations that rarely fail is a bad managed services candidate. If nothing breaks, you're paying every month for monitoring that never has anything to report. Break-fix, even at $150/hour, stays cheaper.
But a shop running production-line PCs, a shared file server, and network gear tying it all together is a different animal — a network hiccup there means idle machines and idle labor. If four hours of downtime costs you $4,800 in lost output and idle wages, and that happens twice a year on top of routine ticket volume, you've already paid for a year of monitoring that could have caught the failing switch or the full disk before it took the line down. Same logic for a retail operation running point-of-sale across a few locations. A POS system down during a Saturday rush isn't a $150 ticket, it's lost sales you don't get back. If that's your risk, take a look at what managed support in Anderson or Clemson actually covers before you decide.
What do you actually get for the monthly fee?
This is where a lot of owners get nervous, and rightly so. "Monthly fee" can mean almost anything depending on who's selling it. Here's what's actually in it, no more:
- Essential ($95/user/month): monitoring for whether systems are up and whether disks are healthy, business-hours support, next-business-day response, and optional backup.
- Professional ($155/user/month): full monitoring of systems, services, and patching, AI-assisted triage on incidents, a one-hour target for first response on critical issues, and backup included.
- Enterprise ($205/user/month): everything in Professional plus strategic IT planning, one included penetration test per contract year, and a 30-minute target for first response on critical issues.
Two things worth being precise about. First, those response times are how fast someone looks at the problem, not how fast it's fixed. A server rebuild still takes however long a server rebuild takes. Second, only Professional and Enterprise carry measured, tracked response targets; Essential is business-hours support without a numeric SLA. Want the full breakdown before you commit to anything? Our services page lays it out plainly.
Will they just upsell me?
This is the real fear behind the question, so let's answer it directly. A monthly plan has a flat, one-time $500 onboarding fee across all managed tiers. That's it, no hidden setup markup. There's a 5% discount for a 12-month commitment, or 8% if you prepay the year. Anything outside the plan, a network redesign, new cabling for a shop floor, a security assessment, gets quoted separately as a fixed-fee project before any work starts. You approve the number in writing. Nothing gets added mid-stream. If a provider can't tell you exactly what's inside the monthly number and what isn't, that's the wrong provider, managed or not.
Here at C3, we evaluate your business to determine what is the best fit. I have seen many smaller customers get by just fine with a break-fix methodology, and that's perfectly acceptable. I have also seen small-medium businesses start to grow and their technology demands also grow, but outpace the capabilities that the small or medium sized business can sustain. They simply don't have the knowledge in house to manage the growth and what to look for to ensure that their systems continue operating. This is where I typically see businesses start questioning their methods and really evaluating what to do next; hire an IT resource or source a managed service provider that can fill this gap with a set month-month fee. Typically, it's better to identify these patterns early and not wait for catastrophe to hit before making these decisions.
What to do about it
You don't need us to answer this for you. You need three numbers, and you already have access to all of them.
Pull your last six months of break-fix invoices. Count the tickets, not just the dollars. If you're averaging more than one call a month, that's your first flag.
Estimate one hour of downtime, honestly. For a shop, it's idle wages plus lost production. For a retailer, it's lost sales plus the labor standing around not selling anything. If that number clears $500, downtime, not the invoice, is your real cost driver.
Multiply the right way. Take your headcount, multiply by the tier that matches your actual risk (Essential if you mostly need someone watching for failures, Professional if patching and faster response matter, Enterprise if you're in a regulated or compliance-sensitive supply chain), and compare that monthly number against what you actually spent on break-fix over the same period. Not what you're afraid you'll spend.
If the math says stay on break-fix, stay on it. There's no version of this where we tell a 12-person shop with reliable equipment to sign a contract they don't need. If the math says you've been paying a tax on downtime for the last year without knowing it, that's a conversation worth having. Reach out and we'll run the numbers with you before anything gets signed.