Nobody publishes their rate card, so owners end up comparing quotes with no idea whether the spread they are seeing is normal. It usually is. Here is roughly where the South Florida market sits in 2026 and, more usefully, what makes a number reasonable or not.
The three shapes of pricing
Hourly runs 125 to 200 dollars an hour here, sometimes with a block of prepaid time at a discount. It suits companies with almost no infrastructure and a high tolerance for surprise.
Per seat monthly is the common arrangement for anyone with more than about ten staff. Expect 80 to 150 dollars per user per month, depending on what sits inside it.
Per device pricing exists and is worth understanding, because a company with more machines than people pays very differently under it. Ask which model a quote uses before comparing two numbers.
What should be inside a per seat price
Monitoring and alerting on every machine. Patching for operating systems and the main applications. Antivirus. Backup, and specifically backup verification rather than just a backup job. Helpdesk with a stated response time. Some quantity of on site visits.
What is usually outside: hardware, third party licences, project work, and anything that counts as a migration. That is fair, as long as the boundary is written down.
The line to watch is the one between support and projects. A vaguely drawn boundary is where a flat rate quietly becomes an hourly one.
Two numbers to sanity check any quote
Per employee per month across the whole IT budget, including licences and hardware amortisation. For a normal office based business without heavy compliance, somewhere between 200 and 400 dollars is unremarkable. Under 120 usually means something is not being done. Over 600 needs a reason, and there often is one.
As a share of revenue, most small businesses land between two and four per cent. Professional services with regulatory requirements run higher.
These are blunt instruments. Use them to find out which questions to ask, not to conclude that you are being robbed.
Where the cheap quote gets its money back
A response time with no consequence attached. Four hours means nothing if nothing happens when it is missed.
An onboarding fee that appears after signature, once they have seen the estate. Have the assessment done first.
Hardware resold at a margin. If your provider makes money on what you buy, their advice about what you need is compromised. Buy directly.
Long contracts. Anything over twelve months without an exit clause is compensating for something.
What actually drives your number
Compliance is the biggest single factor. HIPAA or PCI adds real work, and a quote that ignores it is either uninformed or planning to charge you later.
Age of hardware comes second. Supporting six year old machines costs more than supporting three year old ones, every month, forever.
Then remote work, the number of locations, and how tolerant your business is of downtime. A logistics broker losing a morning is a different problem from an architecture practice losing one.
How to make the comparison fair
Ask every provider for the same three things: what is included, what is explicitly excluded, and what happened the last time they missed a response target. The third question is the one that separates them.