At what company size does in-house IT make sense?

As a rule of thumb, the first dedicated in-house IT hire starts making sense around 40 to 50 staff. Even then it's usually paired with an MSP in a co-managed arrangement, for 24/7 coverage, security operations, and specialist depth one person can't provide alone.

What does an MSP cost for a 10-person office in BC?

At typical Vancouver-area rates of $120 to $250 per user per month, a 10-person office pays roughly $1,200 to $2,500 monthly for fully managed IT including security, backups, and helpdesk. That's a fraction of any qualified hire.

Can we keep our current IT person and still use an MSP?

Yes, and that's co-managed IT. Your staff member keeps the hands-on and institutional-knowledge role while the MSP provides tooling, monitoring, security operations, and escalation support behind them. It typically costs 40 to 60% of a fully managed plan.

July 15, 2026

MSP vs. In-House IT: Which Costs Less for a BC Small Business?

By Anojh Thayaparan, Founder, Glimpse Networks

For most BC businesses under about 50 staff, a managed service provider costs less than one in-house IT hire. Roughly $36,000 to $75,000 a year for a fully managed 25-person company, against $90,000 and up all-in for a single junior sysadmin before tooling. Past that size the answer shifts toward a co-managed mix. Here's the math, including the parts that favour hiring.

What an in-house IT hire actually costs

A junior systems administrator in the Lower Mainland earns roughly $70,000 to $90,000. Add CPP, EI, WorkSafeBC, benefits, and vacation, and the loaded cost lands 20 to 30% higher before they've closed a single ticket.

Then comes everything the job posting leaves out:

Tooling. Monitoring, endpoint security, backup software, a ticketing system, and documentation platforms are licensed per technician or per device, and they add five figures a year without much effort.
Coverage gaps. One person works about 225 days a year. Vacation, sick days, training, and turnover leave you exposed the other 140, and nobody is watching anything at 2 a.m. regardless.
Breadth limits. One generalist cannot be strong at networking, security, cloud, and helpdesk at the same time. The weak areas accumulate risk quietly.
Turnover. IT staff are in demand. When they leave, institutional knowledge and undocumented passwords leave with them, and replacing them takes months.

What an MSP costs for the same company

Fully managed plans in the Vancouver area run $120 to $250 per user per month, as our pricing guide breaks down. For a 25-person company that's $36,000 to $75,000 a year, and the price already contains the security stack, the backup platform, 24/7 monitoring, and a team's worth of breadth: helpdesk technicians, network engineers, security specialists.

Price isn't the strongest argument for the MSP model, though. The stronger one is that your coverage stops depending on one human being staying available, healthy, and employed by you.

Where in-house wins

Honesty matters here. An in-house person is physically present every day, learns your line-of-business applications far more deeply than any external team will, and can absorb work that isn't strictly IT. If your operation needs someone touching hardware daily, a busy warehouse or a production floor with constant device churn, that presence has real value no remote helpdesk fully replaces.

The break-even point, and the co-managed middle

Below roughly 40 to 50 staff, a fully managed plan almost always costs less than the first in-house hire and covers more. Above it, the smart play is usually co-managed IT. Your in-house person handles the daily hands-on work and internal projects while the MSP supplies 24/7 monitoring, security operations, backup verification, and escalation depth, typically at 40 to 60% of a fully managed plan.

The wrong answer at almost any size is one overloaded IT person with no tooling budget and no backup. That is also, unfortunately, the most common setup we assess.