<\/p>\n
3-minute read<\/span>DataRoad<\/span><\/p>\n In summary<\/p>\n In this article<\/p>\n One of the first questions any manager asks before hiring IT support is simple: How much will it cost?<\/strong> The answer is not a single number \u2014 it depends on the number of jobs, the criticality of the systems and the intended service level. But it is possible to give a realistic guideline, based on the most widely used contracting models in Portugal.<\/p>\n In the Portuguese market, companies typically choose between two models:<\/p>\n The hourly rate hides the real cost.<\/strong> A low tariff with call-outs, emergencies and out-of-hours billed separately can end up being more expensive than a retainer that includes everything.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Regardless of the model chosen, the final price is determined by a set of concrete variables:<\/p>\n An ad-hoc support proposal with a lower hourly rate can, in practice, work out more expensive by the end of the year: each incident represents an additional cost, there is no guarantee of response time, and the lack of continuous monitoring means that disk failures, corrupted backups or missing security updates are only detected when they have already caused a problem \u2014 which is usually more expensive to fix than it would have been to prevent. It is for this reason that most companies with more than 10 employees end up migrating from ad-hoc support to a managed retainer model.<\/p>\n A simple way to evaluate this is to add up, over the last 12 months, all the ad-hoc support invoices paid to external suppliers or the time of an internal employee dedicated to solving IT problems instead of doing their usual work. This figure, divided by 12, provides a direct basis for comparison with the monthly cost of a retainer \u2014 and usually reveals that reactive support was already costing more than it seemed, only in a dispersed and less visible way on each invoice.<\/p>\n DataRoad works with the model IT Unlimited<\/strong>, an unlimited IT support contract, tailored to the number of users and the criticality of each company's systems. To find out how much IT support for your company would cost, the simplest step is to request a tailored quote \u2014 with no obligation.<\/p>\n\n
\n
The two most common models: one-off vs monthly retainer<\/h2>\n
\n
What factors influence the price<\/h2>\n
\n
Why the lowest price is not always the cheapest<\/h2>\n
How to work out whether it is worth switching to a retainer<\/h2>\n
What to ask before signing<\/h2>\n
\n