Managed IT Pricing in Calgary & Alberta: What It Costs and Why

Most managed IT quotes in Calgary land somewhere between $85 and $185 per user per month (industry benchmark, 2025). The variance is real, and it usually comes down to five drivers:

1. Headcount and device count. More users means more endpoints to monitor, more accounts to manage, more support tickets per month.
2. Compliance requirements. Law firms need PIPEDA + Law Society of Alberta safeguards. Accounting firms need PIPEDA + tighter data residency. Energy and healthcare-adjacent firms add another layer. Compliance costs real money to implement and prove.
3. Server footprint. A team running fully in Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace costs less to manage than one with on-premises servers, VPNs, and legacy line-of-business apps.
4. Cybersecurity depth. Basic endpoint protection is cheap. Managed detection & response (MDR), email security, SOC monitoring, and incident response add real cost — and real protection.
5. Strategic planning vs. break-fix. A vCIO-led engagement with a 24-month IT roadmap, quarterly reviews, and proactive budgeting costs more than a help desk that just answers tickets. The first is an investment; the second is an expense.

Anyone quoting you a flat per-user number without asking about these five things is either underpricing (and will add fees later) or overpricing (and won't earn the work).

For Calgary businesses under 75 employees, the math usually favours managed IT. A single in-house IT employee in Alberta costs $65,000–$85,000 per year in salary alone — before benefits, training, the tools they need, and the operational risk of having one person hold all your institutional IT knowledge.

For a 15-person team, comprehensive managed IT from Always Beyond typically runs $20,000–$35,000 per year total. Same coverage hours (more, actually — we don't take vacation as a team), broader skill set (network, security, cloud, compliance, vendor management, strategy), no single point of failure, and a built-in 24-month roadmap that one person rarely has the bandwidth to build.

The crossover point where in-house starts to make sense is usually around 75–100 employees — and even then, the smart pattern is a co-managed model: your internal lead plus our team for after-hours, specialist work, and strategic depth.

Three categories of cost almost never live inside a monthly managed IT fee, and any provider claiming otherwise is moving the cost somewhere you can't see it:

• Hardware and software licensing. Workstations, servers, network gear, Microsoft 365 licenses, line-of-business app licenses — these are pass-through costs at vendor pricing. We don't markup. We do recommend specific products and handle procurement.
• One-time projects. Cloud migrations, network refreshes, office moves, mergers and acquisitions IT integration. These are scoped and quoted separately — transparent fixed-fee or hourly, your choice.
• Third-party compliance audits. If you need a SOC 2 attestation or PIPEDA audit signed by an external assessor, that's a separate engagement with a CPA firm or compliance auditor. We prepare you for it and support you through it; we don't run the audit itself.

Anything else — ongoing support, monitoring, security, backup, the help desk — is inside the monthly fee. Always.