How IT support pricing works in New Zealand

The four common models

• Hourly or ad-hoc — you pay for time as you use it. Simple, unpredictable, and no prevention included.
• Prepaid blocks — you buy hours up front, often at a lower rate. Better value, but still reactive.
• Per user or per device — a recurring monthly fee covering an agreed set of services for each person or asset.
• Fully managed — a monthly agreement covering monitoring, security, help desk and maintenance as one service.

What drives the number

Two businesses with the same headcount can be quoted very differently, and usually for good reasons:

• Number of users and devices, and how many are shared
• Servers, whether on-premise, hosted or cloud
• Coverage hours — business hours versus genuine 24/7
• Number of sites, and whether onsite attendance is included
• Security requirements, compliance obligations and audit needs
• Age and condition of the existing environment — legacy systems cost more to support
• Whether software licensing is bundled into the fee or billed separately

The costs people forget

Onboarding is the big one. Documenting an undocumented environment, cleaning up permissions and getting monitoring in place is real work, and it's often quoted separately from the monthly fee.

Projects also sit outside most managed agreements — migrations, office moves, new hardware rollouts. So do third-party licences, hardware itself, and after-hours work where the agreement covers business hours only. None of these are unreasonable; they just need to be visible before you sign.

How to compare quotes fairly

Write one scope document and send the same one to every provider. State your user count, device count, servers, sites, coverage hours and any compliance requirements, then ask each provider to price against it and list what they've excluded.

Then compare on total annual cost including onboarding, not on the monthly headline. A cheaper monthly fee with everything excluded is usually the most expensive option once a real year has happened.

A note on the cheapest quote

Support is delivered by people, and coverage costs what it costs. A quote well below the others is generally buying you narrower scope, slower response, thinner security, or an overseas queue — not a better deal. Ask what has been left out, and you'll usually find the answer in the difference.