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 40–50 staff — and even then, usually paired with an MSP in a co-managed arrangement for 24/7 coverage, security operations, and specialist depth.

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

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

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

Yes — 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 40–60% 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–$75,000 per year for a fully managed 25-person company versus $90,000+ all-in for a single junior sysadmin, before tooling. Past that size the answer shifts toward a co-managed mix. Here's the honest math.

What an in-house IT hire actually costs

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

Then comes everything the job posting doesn't mention:

Tooling — monitoring, endpoint security, backup software, a ticketing system, and documentation platforms are licensed per-technician or per-device and easily add five figures a year.
Coverage gaps — one person works about 225 days a year. Vacation, sick days, training, and turnover leave you exposed the other 140, and nobody monitors anything at 2 a.m.
Breadth limits — one generalist cannot be strong at networking, security, cloud, and helpdesk simultaneously. The weak areas quietly accumulate risk.
Turnover — IT staff are in demand; when they leave, institutional knowledge and undocumented passwords leave with them, and recruiting a replacement takes months.

What an MSP costs for the same company

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

The MSP model's real advantage isn't just price — it's that coverage and expertise don't depend on one human being available, healthy, and still 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 deeply, and can absorb non-IT duties. If your operation needs someone touching hardware daily — a busy warehouse, a production floor with constant device churn — that presence has genuine value no remote helpdesk fully replaces.

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

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

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