Pay-as-you-go IT feels cheap because the only number you see is the invoice. But every callout also costs you the hours your staff spent waiting, the outages nobody was watching for, and the security you still have to buy separately – because break-fix only starts working after something breaks. Put in your numbers and compare the whole bill.
Estimates are fine. Everything updates as you type.
We add 30% on top for the real cost of employing someone (KiwiSaver, ACC, overhead).
Callouts, remote sessions, "can you take a look at" emails that turn into billable time.
Reactive help starts when you ring, not when the problem starts. Someone was struggling well before that.
With nobody monitoring your systems, these announce themselves. We assume 4 hours each, most work stopped.
Endpoint protection, email security, backups – break-fix doesn't include them. Set to 0 if you'd go without.
Enter what you pay or have been quoted for fully managed IT including the security stack.
invoices + waiting + outages + security
one predictable fee, security included
Cumulative cost through the year. One line is a budget. The other is a guess.
This model counts four real costs of reactive IT: callout invoices (problems × billable hours × rate), waiting time (the fully-loaded wages of staff limping along before and during each fix), unplanned whole-office outages (assumed 4 hours each with 75% of work stopped – with no monitoring, problems surface as outages rather than quiet fixes), and the security and backup subscriptions you still need to buy to match what managed IT includes. The managed column is your entered fee plus a residual disruption allowance (we assume proactive monitoring and maintenance prevents roughly two-thirds of interruptions, in line with industry findings – not all of them). The model deliberately excludes the harder-to-price differences: break-fix providers have no incentive to prevent repeat problems, no one is watching your backups or patches between callouts, and a serious incident lands entirely on you. Figures are indicative; talk to us for a comparison based on your actual history.
It's not that break-fix technicians are bad people. It's that the model pays them by the hour, after the failure, with no reward for preventing the next one. Managed IT inverts the incentive: Tanglin earns the same fixed fee whether your month is quiet or chaotic – so it's our interest, not just yours, to make every month quiet.
That's why monitoring, patching, tested backups and the security stack are all inside the fee. The failing disk gets replaced before it fails. The patch goes on before the exploit circulates. The outage that would have cost you a morning becomes an alert we cleared overnight. You're not paying more for the same service – you're paying for a different model, one where prevention is the product.
The economics of reactive versus proactive IT have been studied for years, and the findings are consistent:
Sources: Datto/Kaseya State of the MSP and SMB downtime research; Dell/Forrester IT operations studies; ITIC Hourly Cost of Downtime surveys (2023–2026). Figures are international and shown for context; Tanglin's calculator above uses your own inputs in NZD.
Tell us how many people and devices you have, and we'll send back a clear, fixed monthly figure with the security stack included – no obligation.
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