For a small business in Reno or Sparks, IT support costs $125 an hour when you need it, or about $90 an hour if you buy time in advance. A twelve-person office that uses roughly four hours a month lands near $4,600 a year. Those are my published rates, and the rest of this explains how the number moves.
I lead with the figure because almost nobody else in this market will. Search for what IT support costs around here and you’ll get a dozen pages of “every business is different, contact us for a customized quote.” Some of that is genuine — businesses really do differ. Most of it is a sales structure, and it exists because a number you can’t compare is a number you can’t negotiate.
The three ways IT support gets sold
Nearly every arrangement you’ll be offered is one of these three, or a blend. Knowing which one you’re being quoted is most of the battle, because the numbers aren’t directly comparable until you convert them.
Hourly, as needed. Something breaks, you call, you pay for the time. No commitment either direction. Simple to understand, easy to budget against if your problems are occasional, and genuinely expensive if they aren’t. This is how most small businesses start.
Prepaid blocks of hours. You buy time up front at a discount and draw it down. It rewards you for planning without locking you into a contract, and it changes the conversation in a way people underrate: once the hours are already bought, you stop hesitating to call about the small stuff, which is usually the stuff that becomes the big stuff.
Per-user or per-device managed contracts. A flat monthly fee covering an agreed scope — typically monitoring, patching, antivirus, and a set amount of support. This is what most managed service providers sell, and it’s priced per head: so many dollars per user per month, billed whether or not anything breaks.
I’m not going to quote you what other firms in Northern Nevada charge per user. I don’t have their current price sheets in front of me, made-up numbers would be worse than none, and you can get real ones by asking two of them. What I can do is give you my own numbers in full, and show you how to convert a per-user quote into something you can hold next to them.
What I charge
All of this is on my pricing page and has been for a while.
- Business IT support: $125/hour.
- Emergency and after-hours: $250/hour, two-hour minimum — so a $500 floor if you call me out at 11pm.
- Prepaid blocks: 5 hours $550 ($110/hr) · 10 hours $1,000 ($100/hr) · 20 hours $1,800 ($90/hr). They don’t expire.
- Business Automation Audit: $1,500 flat, two weeks, credited toward implementation if you go ahead.
The blocks are where the real difference sits. Twenty hours at $90 instead of $125 saves $700 against the same work bought piecemeal, and there’s no expiry date pressuring you to burn hours you don’t need.
A worked example: twelve people in a Sparks office
Say you run a twelve-person business — a contractor, a clinic, a small professional firm. Nothing exotic: Microsoft 365, a shared drive, a couple of printers, a phone system, laptops of varying ages.
Over a normal year that generates a fairly predictable set of work. Two people join and one leaves, so three rounds of account setup and teardown. Two laptops get replaced and configured. Email breaks in some interesting way twice. Somebody clicks something they shouldn’t and you need it looked at that day. The shared drive fills up. A printer stops talking to half the office for reasons that make no sense. Patching and updates need someone to actually watch them.
Call it four hours a month, so 48 hours a year. That’s the figure to argue with if you think your office is busier or quieter — everything below just follows from it.
Paying hourly as you go: 48 × $125 = $6,000 a year.
Using prepaid blocks: two 20-hour blocks covers 40 hours for $3,600. The remaining 8 hours at the standard rate is $1,000. Total $4,600 a year — a saving of $1,400, or a bit over 23%, for nothing more than deciding in advance.
Now the useful part. Divide that $4,600 by twelve people and twelve months:
$4,600 ÷ 12 users ÷ 12 months ≈ $32 per user per month.
That is your comparison number. When a managed provider quotes you a per-user monthly figure, hold it against $32 and ask what the difference buys. Sometimes the answer is real and worth paying for — 24/7 monitoring, a staffed help desk, guaranteed response windows, security tooling you’d otherwise buy separately. Sometimes the answer is that you’re paying a subscription for work that, at your size, amounts to a few hours a month. Both happen. You can only tell which one you’re looking at if you’ve done this division first.
What actually pushes the number up
Four hours a month is an average, and averages hide the things that matter. In my experience the costs that surprise Northern Nevada business owners are these.
Old equipment. A five-year-old laptop doesn’t cost you a purchase, it costs you an hour here and an hour there, repeatedly, until the accumulated hours exceed what a replacement would have been. This is the most common form of expensive thrift I see.
Nobody owning the passwords. When the person who set up the domain, the email, or the phone system has left and nobody knows the login, ordinary jobs turn into recovery projects. A two-hour task becomes six hours of proving to a vendor that you’re entitled to your own account.
Calling late. The same fault costs $125 an hour on Tuesday morning and $250 an hour with a two-hour minimum on Saturday night. A surprising share of emergencies were visible as small problems a week earlier.
Deferred cleanup. Every workaround left in place is a small permanent tax on every future job, because the next person has to understand the workaround before they can do anything else.
Support labor is not your whole IT bill
This trips people up constantly, and it’s worth separating clearly, because “what does IT support cost” and “what does IT cost” are different questions with different answers.
Everything above is labor — my time, doing work. Sitting alongside it is a set of recurring costs you’d pay whether I existed or not: Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace licensing per user per month, antivirus and endpoint protection, offsite backup, your internet service, your phone system, and domain and certificate renewals. Then there’s hardware, which is lumpy and unpredictable rather than monthly — laptops on a four-to-five-year cycle, a switch or access point when one dies, a printer nobody planned for.
For that twelve-person Sparks office, the subscription layer alone will typically run somewhere in the same order of magnitude as the support labor — sometimes more. I’m not going to invent a precise figure, because it swings enormously depending on which Microsoft 365 tier you’re on and whether you’re paying for security tooling. But if you budget for support and forget the subscriptions, you’ll be wrong by roughly half.
One thing worth knowing: a per-user managed contract sometimes bundles some of these in and sometimes doesn’t, and the two versions can look almost identical on a quote. When you’re comparing, ask flatly which licenses and which tools are included in the monthly number and which get billed on top. That single question has changed the ranking of competing quotes more than once in front of me.
When hourly is the wrong answer and you should sign a contract
It would be convenient for me to tell you that buying time by the hour is always the smart move. It isn’t, and here is where I’d tell you to go elsewhere.
If downtime costs you serious money by the hour, you need a guaranteed response window, and that means a contract with someone who has the staff to honor it at 3am. Every call comes straight to me, which is why you get a fast answer from someone who already knows your setup rather than a ticket number. I’ll tell you plainly what I can commit to. But if an hour of your systems being down costs more than a day of my time, buy the guarantee.
If you’re regulated — healthcare, financial services, anything with an auditor asking for documented controls and evidence of continuous monitoring — you likely need a provider whose whole model is producing that paperwork. Hourly work can meet the substance and still fail the audit on documentation.
If you’re past roughly 25 to 30 people, the math starts to turn. Support volume tends to rise faster than headcount, and at some point a flat monthly fee is both cheaper and less stressful than watching an hourly meter.
And if your team can’t tolerate a queue, be honest about it. Working with an independent consultant means there will be days when you’re second in line. For most small businesses that’s a fine trade for talking to someone who already knows their setup. For some it isn’t, and it’s better to know that before you’re annoyed about it.
Is there a minimum charge for a small job?
For scheduled work during business hours I bill the time it takes, so a twenty-minute fix is a twenty-minute fix. The exception is emergency and after-hours work, which carries a two-hour minimum at $250 an hour because it means dropping everything else. Prepaid block hours draw down the same way.
Do prepaid hours expire if we don’t use them?
No. Blocks never expire, so buying twenty hours in January and still having six of them in December costs you nothing. That is deliberate — expiry dates push people to spend hours on work they do not need, which is a bad outcome for both of us.
How is this different from a managed IT contract?
A managed contract is a flat monthly fee for an agreed scope, billed whether or not anything breaks. Hourly and block work bills only what you use. Contracts win when you need guaranteed response times, continuous monitoring, or audit documentation. Hourly wins when your actual support volume is modest and predictable.
What does an emergency call actually cost?
$250 an hour with a two-hour minimum, so $500 is the floor for after-hours work. Before you call at midnight, it is worth asking whether the problem genuinely cannot wait until 8am — often it can, and that decision is worth several hundred dollars.
Can you tell me what my business should be spending?
Not from a blog post, but the arithmetic above gets you close. Estimate your monthly support hours honestly, multiply out, and divide by headcount to get a per-user figure you can compare against any quote. If you would rather not guess, an hour of conversation usually produces a realistic number.
If you want a real number for your own office rather than a worked example, the fastest route is a conversation about what you actually run and what actually breaks. Everything I charge is on the pricing page, the full range of what I do is on services, and if what’s really keeping you up is security rather than cost, start with cybersecurity. Call (775) 823-3333 or email [email protected].