IT Pricing – How Much Should a Small Business in Dallas Pay for IT Support?

Most owners who call us have the same two questions. What does IT support cost, and what am I getting for it? Sometimes they’ve never paid for it before and the numbers in front of them mean nothing. Other times they have been paying for years and still do not understand how the billing works.

We have answered those questions for Dallas small businesses since 2007. You should be able to predict your IT cost, in one number, and know it covers everything. The bookkeeper’s laptop, the new hire in March, the trip to your office when the printer won’t cooperate, all of it inside that one figure. When that’s true, everything is simpler, from your budget to how your service provider manages your IT.

How we charge, and why

For years before launching mindIT, our team watched owners sit on small problems because a simple call cost money, and then we would watch those small problems grow into the emergencies everyone had been trying to avoid. We built mindIT on a monthly model. One flat fee for each user, and inside that fee the day-to-day support, the projects, the changes, the new hires, and the visits to your office. Almost twenty years later, that is still how we work.

The reason it works is simple. When help costs nothing extra, people call early, and early problems are cheap. A five-minute fix on Tuesday morning is better for you than a rebuilt server on Friday night, and it’s better for us too.

What “per user” means

We price by the person, because that’s the fairest way to match cost to work, and the people in your building don’t all need the same support.

A full managed user is someone whose job happens on a computer all day. Your bookkeeper, your office manager, whoever is answering email from eight to five. That person needs a device managed, software patched, backups running, and a real human to call when something breaks.

A light user is your warehouse crew, your drivers, your retail floor. They need a Microsoft 365 identity, security around that identity, and a backup of it. They don’t need someone to come fix a laptop they don’t have, so we bill them at a lower rate.

A few sites carry a third line for physical infrastructure. A church with 60 users might also have 60 wireless access points, 15 switches, and five network closets, and a per-user number alone doesn’t cover the full scope of support needed. For a typical office it rarely comes up.

What’s inside our monthly fee

Our monthly fee includes:

  • Projects, changes, and added users
  • On-site visits when remote support won’t cut it
  • Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace licensing and management
  • Antivirus plus managed endpoint detection and response
  • Phishing protection on your email
  • Backup for servers, desktops, and cloud accounts, with someone checking every week that it ran
  • Operating system and application patching
  • Password management
  • Security awareness training for your staff
  • Documentation of every device, password, and domain you own for your records
  • Help buying and setting up new equipment

What you won’t find on our proposal

There’s no onboarding fee. The first few months with a new client are the heaviest work we do, cleaning up years of accumulated problems, and we cover that cost ourselves because our hope is we will work together for the long term.

There’s no minimum user count. A five-person firm gets the same service as a fifty-person one.

Our typical agreement runs one year, with the freedom to end it any time and no penalty for doing so. We believe in our work and our communication with our clients and let that do the talking.

In the first few months of onboarding, we read your bills. When we took on a five-person marketing company last spring, the licensing cleanup alone offset a meaningful chunk of our monthly fee. A $200 tool nobody opened, duplicate seats, a domain registrar charging four times the going rate. That money is yours, and finding those extra monthly dollars to put back in your pocket is one of our favorite parts of a new relationship.

Questions worth asking any provider

We’d suggest bringing these to every conversation, including one with us.

  1. Where is your team located, and who answers when I call?
  2. Is project work billed separately from the monthly fee?
  3. What happens to my bill when I add an employee?
  4. What’s the contract term, and what does it cost to leave?
  5. Is there an onboarding fee?
  6. If I leave, who owns my documentation and my data, how do I get it, and what does it look like?

If you’d like to talk through pricing for your small business we would love to chat!

Give us a call!

Switching IT providers is not the disaster most owners imagine. The risk lives almost entirely in a sloppy handoff, and a careful provider designs that risk out of the process by securing everything before making the change. What’s left is the part you wanted: a fresh set of eyes, a cleaned-up setup, and support that answers when you need it.

If you’ve been putting off a switch because the change felt like more trouble than it’s worth, it’s worth knowing the trouble is mostly avoidable. The hardest part is usually just deciding to start.