Ask three Houston IT companies what managed services cost and you’ll get three different answers — and none of them is the number you actually pay twelve months in.
Published pricing for managed IT across the Houston metro runs roughly $75 to $300 per user, per month. That’s a 4x spread, and the reason it’s so wide isn’t geography or greed. It’s that “managed IT” describes wildly different things depending on who’s writing the quote. A number near the bottom of that range and a number near the top can look identical on a one-page proposal and cover completely different work.
This guide breaks down what each tier actually buys, why the cheap quote almost always climbs, and where an accounting or tax firm should expect to land. Every range here comes from published Houston MSP pricing guides and vendor list pricing for 2026 — we don’t name competitors, and we don’t need to.
The market, by tier
Strip away the branding and Houston managed IT sorts into three honest tiers. Here’s the per-user range for each and what generally comes with it.
| Tier | Per user / mo | What’s typically included |
|---|---|---|
| Basic / help-desk | $75–125 | Remote help desk, patching, antivirus (not EDR). Backup and after-hours often extra or absent. |
| Standard managed | $125–200 | Monitoring, patching, real EDR, backup, some firewall/network management, business-hours SLA. |
| Premium / compliance | $200–300 | Full security stack, compliance support, vCIO/strategy, priority SLA, tighter response targets. |
Most small Houston offices are quoted from the bottom two tiers, then discover partway through the contract that they needed pieces of the third. Which brings us to the part of the quote nobody itemizes.
What the cheap tier actually includes
The single biggest gap between a $90 quote and a $160 one usually comes down to one word: antivirus versus EDR.
Antivirus — the built-in Defender, or a consumer-grade AV — matches files against a list of known-bad signatures. It’s fine for yesterday’s threats and useless against anything new. EDR (endpoint detection and response) watches behavior: a process encrypting files at 2 a.m., credentials being dumped, a login from a country you’ve never visited. It flags and stops the attack in progress, and it gives someone a record to investigate afterward. For any business that handles client data, that’s the line between a bad morning and a breach-notification letter.
A quote with “antivirus included” and a quote with “EDR included” are not the same product at two prices. They’re two different products.
The same quiet substitution shows up on backup (“file sync” standing in for tested, ransomware-resistant recovery), on the firewall (unmanaged box vs. actively monitored policy), and on support hours. None of it is dishonest, exactly. It’s just left off the page — until you need it.
Rebuilding the walk-up quote
Here’s the honest math. Take a typical Houston “walk-up” base rate and add back the pieces a real managed plan needs. We’ll run it for a 10-person office so the flat costs (firewall, onboarding) spread across seats the way they actually would.
| Line item | Market cost | Per user* |
|---|---|---|
| Base managed rate | — | $100–125 |
| EDR (real endpoint security) | $6–18 / seat | $6–18 |
| Backup & recovery | ~$15 / seat | ~$15 |
| Managed firewall | $30–75 / mo | $3–8 |
| Onboarding, amortized (yr 1) | $500–1,500 once | $8–9 |
| Real effective rate | $132–175 |
*Per-user figures assume a 10-seat office; flat costs (firewall, onboarding) divided across seats. Onboarding is one-time and shown spread over the first 12 months.
So the quote that opened at $100–125 per user is really $132–175 once it does the job you hired it for. That’s a 30–40% climb between the sticker and the invoice — and it’s the most common surprise in a first-year managed IT relationship.
The line item that isn’t in the quote at all: after-hours
Almost every walk-up rate assumes support happens between 9 and 5. When your server dies the night before payroll, or ransomware hits over a holiday weekend, that call bills separately. Market-wide, after-hours and emergency rates in the Houston metro run $150 to $500 per hour, sometimes at a two-hour minimum.
For a business with real deadlines — and most have them — that’s not a rare line item. It’s the one that turns a predictable monthly number into a bill you can’t forecast.
If you’re an accounting or tax firm, expect to pay more
Published industry data puts managed IT for accounting and tax firms at $150 to $260 per user, per month — noticeably above the general small-business range. There are good reasons for it. These firms carry client financial data, sit under the FTC Safeguards Rule and GLBA, and the IRS now requires a written information security plan — a WISP — tied to PTIN renewal. Add a brutal seasonal surge every spring, and the security and support load is simply heavier.
If that’s your firm, the WISP requirement alone is worth understanding before renewal season. See our guide: The WISP Rule — what every Texas tax preparer must have before PTIN renewal.
What we charge — and why it’s on a public page
We built our pricing to remove the surprise, not to win the sticker war. One flat per-workstation number, with the whole stack already inside it.
Other Guys IT — everything included
Servers $275/month. Licenses at cost. That’s the entire price list.
- SentinelOne EDR on every workstation and server — behavior-based, not signature antivirus
- Axcient backup & disaster recovery with restores we actually test (fair-use storage; oversized datasets add storage at our cost)
- Firewall and network fully managed — we spec the gear, you buy it at our cost with zero markup; hardware is never bundled or marked up
- Unlimited support including after-hours, fair use — no $150–500/hr meter, ever
- Same-day response SLA on every ticket, in writing
- On-site onboarding included — 3-workstation minimum, 12-month term, price locked
- Projects (migrations, moves, buildouts) always quoted separately in writing
Compared against the reconstructed market rate above, an all-in $125 lands below where a “cheaper” $115 quote actually ends up — except there’s no after-hours meter waiting, and the number on this page is the number on your invoice.