IT Cost Calculator

Managed IT is $50 per user a month: remote help desk, monitoring and patching, device support, staff setup and a named senior IT lead. Secure Essentials is $75 per user a month and adds Microsoft 365 backup (three daily backups, up to seven years kept), email protection, multi-factor sign-in, password vaults and credential management. Secure Professional, Onward's recommended level, is $105 per user a month and adds device threat detection and response, security awareness training with phishing tests, web and DNS filtering, identity protection and security log retention. Secure Enterprise is $135 per user a month and adds threat hunting, admin rights only when needed, vulnerability scanning and advanced DNS security. On-site support adds $25 per office user a month at covered sites. Frontline staff are $45 per user a month, remote support only.

Onward plans do not include Microsoft 365 licenses, hardware or larger projects. Microsoft 365 Business Premium is $22 per user a month, billed separately. Work outside a plan is $295 an hour. Help desk Monday to Friday, 8 AM to 5 PM Eastern, excluding holidays Onward observes; after-hours and emergency work available at extra charge.

Pay defaults use U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics wages for Cape Coral-Fort Myers, May 2025. IT support specialists averaged $59,380 yearly, or $28.55 hourly. Network and systems administrators averaged $90,210 yearly, or $43.37 hourly. Other staff roles use the same local data. Benefits and payroll taxes start at 42.9% of pay, based on BLS private-industry employer costs for June 2026: benefits were 30.0% of total costs. Training starts at $1,091 per IT employee yearly, from Training magazine's 2025 small-company average. Outside help starts at Onward's $295 hourly rate for work outside a plan. You can change these defaults.

No. This estimate compares your inputs with Onward's July 2026 service catalog prices. “Your setup minus Onward” is simple subtraction. A positive number means your setup costs more; a negative number means it costs less. The difference does not account for differences in services or predict future costs. Onward plans are billed monthly on an annual commitment. A written quote follows a free assessment.

The chart holds your setup's yearly cost fixed as office headcount grows. Dividing that cost among more office users lowers the cost per user. Onward's price per user stays flat. The crossing point is where your setup becomes cheaper per office user. That assumes your setup can support the larger team without extra costs. If you would need more staff, tools or outside help, update your inputs. The chart compares costs; it does not show whether both options include the same services.

NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, lists eight cybersecurity basics for small businesses: multi-factor sign-in, strong passwords, backing up and testing data, changing default passwords, updated antivirus, software patching, learning about phishing and ransomware, and staff training. This tool counts whether a plan includes a service for each basic. Managed IT includes a service for 2 of 8, Secure Essentials 6, Secure Professional 8 and Secure Enterprise 8. Reviewing and updating device passwords is a one-time onboarding step in the Onward Services Guide; it does not include remediation unless the quote says so. A matching service does not mean every part of a basic is covered. For example, backup testing is not listed. Source: NIST Cybersecurity Basics for small businesses, updated August 2026.