At some point every growing business asks it: "Wouldn't it be cheaper to just hire someone?" It's the right question – and it has a real answer, at a real team size. Put in your numbers and see the full cost of an in-house hire, what outsourcing costs for the same team, and where the lines actually cross.
Estimates are fine. Everything updates as you type.
Someone who can genuinely cover servers, network, security and helpdesk – not a junior. We add 30% for KiwiSaver, ACC and overheads.
Monitoring, endpoint protection, backup licensing, helpdesk software – the platforms an MSP already owns.
Technology doesn't stand still. Neither can they.
IT staff move often. A ~$15,000 hiring round every three years, averaged.
Annual leave, sick days, training days – five-plus weeks a year when your one IT person isn't there.
Enter what you pay or have been quoted for fully managed IT including the security stack.
one person, all-in
a full team behind every seat
team size where in-house and outsourced cost the same
Outsourcing scales with your headcount. A hire costs the same whether they're busy or not – and a second hire is a step, not a slope.
This model compares the all-in annual cost of one in-house IT generalist (salary × 1.3 for the true cost of employment, plus tooling, training, recruitment averaged over a typical tenure, and cover for leave) against an outsourced fee that scales with headcount. The chart adds a second hire – as a step – once one person can no longer cover the load (we assume around 70 supported staff per technician). The model deliberately leaves out the differences money doesn't capture: one person is a single point of failure who takes evenings, weekends, holidays and their accumulated knowledge with them; no individual is senior in everything from networking to security to Microsoft 365; and an MSP brings a team, escalation paths, vendor relationships and someone on deck every working day. Figures are indicative; talk to us about what your team actually needs.
Even a genuinely good generalist is one person: one set of strengths, one set of blind spots, 40 hours a week, five-plus weeks a year away. When they're sick, IT is sick. When they resign, your systems' documentation usually resigns with them.
Outsourcing to Tanglin means the fee buys a team – director-led, with specialists across infrastructure, security and Microsoft 365, established vendor relationships, and documented systems that don't live in one person's head. For most businesses under the crossover point, that's more capability than a hire, for less money. And when you do grow past it, we'll tell you – because the right answer at 100 seats isn't the same as at 30, and honest advice is the product.
The economics of the hire-or-partner decision are well established:
Sources: Seek and Glassdoor NZ salary data (2026); industry IT staffing-ratio research; standard NZ employment cost guidance. Figures are indicative; 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 – and an honest view on whether outsourcing is even right for your size.
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