Right-Sized IT: Why We Won't Sell You Tiers You'll Never Use
Most IT providers sell three packages and quietly hope you pick the middle one. We think that gets the order backwards — you should find out what you actually need before anyone quotes you a number.
There’s a standard way to sell managed IT, and you’ve almost certainly seen it. Three columns on a page. Bronze, Silver, Gold, or some variation. The middle one has a “Most Popular” badge. Each column has a price and a list of checkmarks, and the checkmarks get denser as the price goes up.
It’s a tidy way to present a service. It’s also backwards, and we’ve stopped doing it.
What the Three-Column Page Is Actually For
Tiered packages solve a problem for the provider, not for you. They let a company quote without doing any work first. No site visit, no conversation about what you run, no look at the equipment you already own — just pick a column.
That’s efficient for whoever is selling. The cost lands on you, in one of two ways.
You buy too much. The middle column includes things you’ll never use, because it was built for an imaginary average business that doesn’t match yours. You pay for them every month regardless.
You buy too little. The entry column looks affordable, so you take it, and then discover that the thing you actually needed — the after-hours call, the server you forgot to mention, the second location — sits in a higher column or arrives as a separate invoice.
Either way, the mismatch was baked in before anyone looked at your office.
What We Do Instead
We assess first, then quote. That’s the whole idea, and it isn’t complicated.
An assessment means someone actually looks at what you have: how many computers, how many people, what the network hardware is, where your files live, what happens to them at night, which line-of-business software you can’t operate without, and what would genuinely hurt if it stopped working on a Tuesday morning. It usually takes a visit and a conversation, not a form.
Out of that comes a flat monthly price for your business specifically. Not a column. Flat means flat — you know the number before the month starts, and it doesn’t move because a laptop misbehaved.
You’ll still see plan names on our site — Solo, Office, Office+ — with the device counts each is built around. Those are there to give you a rough sense of scale, not to be a menu. Where your business lands, and what it costs, comes out of the assessment.
The Honest Part About Coverage
Right-sizing cuts both ways, and it means being straight about the limits too.
Our monitoring tools watch your systems around the clock. That part genuinely doesn’t sleep — if a drive starts failing at 3am or a backup doesn’t run, the alert fires immediately and it’s waiting when the day starts.
Human investigation and hands-on fixes are Monday to Friday, 9 to 5 Pacific, unless you’ve contracted after-hours coverage. We say that plainly because the alternative — implying someone is awake at 3am when they aren’t — is exactly the kind of overselling this whole approach is meant to avoid.
If your business genuinely needs overnight response, that’s a real requirement and we’ll price it as one. What we won’t do is let you assume you have it.
When You Shouldn’t Hire Us
A right-sized recommendation is sometimes “you don’t need this yet.”
If you’re two people with two laptops, a cloud email account and no server, you probably don’t need a managed IT contract. You need decent backups, MFA turned on everywhere, and someone to call occasionally. We’ll tell you that, and we’d rather tell you that than sign you to a monthly agreement you’ll resent in six months.
If you’re already well set up and just want a second opinion on your backups or your network, that’s an hourly conversation, not a contract.
The businesses that get real value from managed IT tend to be the ones where an outage stops the work — where the shop can’t process a sale, the files aren’t reachable, or the phones and the network are the same thing. If that’s you, the assessment is worth doing.
Why This Suits the Lower Mainland
Most of the businesses we work with around Richmond and the Lower Mainland are small enough that the owner knows every computer by name, and specific enough that no template describes them. A dental office, a trades company running scheduling software from a truck, and a community organization with a volunteer roster have almost nothing in common technically — but a three-column page would sell all three the same middle package.
Assessing first isn’t a premium service. It’s just the step that makes the number honest.
The Takeaway
If a provider can quote you a monthly price before they’ve looked at what you run, they’re pricing a template, not your business. Ask what happens when your situation doesn’t match the column. Ask what’s included after hours, and get the answer in writing.
If you’d like to know what right-sized actually looks like for your office, get in touch — the assessment comes first, and the number comes after.