Flat monthly fee covering unlimited helpdesk, Microsoft 365* management and account administration during business hours. 15-minute P1 response. Infrastructure monitoring (SIEM, patching, backups) is a separately-priced add-on so you only pay for the surface area you have. No vague "managed services" line items. No upselling antivirus you don't need. No "we'll look into it" for three weeks.
You're not alone. The IT support market for South African SMBs is quietly broken. The incentives reward slowness: if you're paying R12,000 a month and your provider is "looking into" the same email delivery problem for three weeks, they still get paid. If they fix it in a day, they still get paid. There is no economic reason for them to be fast.
So you get what you probably recognise: tickets that sit for days, vague monthly invoices with line items like "managed services, R8,500" and a feeling that you're paying good money to be ignored. Meanwhile, your team is doing IT by committee because getting a formal response takes too long.
Our managed IT services were designed from the inverse premise: the only way to make a monthly-fee model honest is to measure response and resolution against SLAs that have teeth, to publish what we did every month so you can audit us, and to be small enough that the founder answers the phone when something's actually broken. That's it. That's the whole model.
A straight list, so you can tell us honestly which parts you want and which you don't. Everything below is in the baseline flat-fee agreement, infrastructure monitoring is a separately-priced add-on so you only pay for what you have.
Infrastructure monitoring and management (servers, firewalls, switches, Wi-Fi access points, SIEM deployment, backup verification, patch management across infrastructure) is a separately-priced add-on service. We quote it alongside your managed services agreement so you can see what each layer costs and decide how much of it you need.
What this covers when added: 24/7 monitoring across infrastructure endpoints via SIEM and agents, patch management for OS and third-party applications, monthly backup restore testing, vendor management (we deal with Microsoft, your ISP, your line-of-business software support), and incident response for infrastructure events. Priced per device and per infrastructure component so you only pay for the surface area you have.
Most of our arguments with prospective clients come from this list. We'd rather have the conversation now than send a surprise invoice six months in.
Honestly: it depends. We quote per-user per-month, plus a flat fee for infrastructure components (servers, firewalls, network gear, backup storage). The number depends on your user count, how complex your environment is, and which tier of service matches your risk profile.
What we won't do is quote off a form. The best way to find out what managed IT services actually cost for your business is to get in touch and talk us through what you need. From there we scope it properly and put a fixed number in writing.
What we will commit to in writing: your monthly fee is fixed for the term, you'll know what triggers additional billable work before it happens, and the contract has a 30-day termination clause after the initial 12 months. No multi-year lock-in.
Managed IT services in South Africa typically cost between R400 and R1,500 per user per month, depending on scope (helpdesk-only vs full infrastructure management), the number of users, and whether cybersecurity and backup are bundled in.
At Immersive IT we quote after we've talked through what you need. We'd rather understand your environment than pretend to know what it costs. Expect our managed services pricing to sit around market average, with the difference being what's actually included: unlimited business-hours helpdesk, Microsoft 365 management, 15-minute P1 response during business hours, monthly service reports and quarterly business reviews come standard. Infrastructure monitoring (including SIEM monitoring) is a separately-priced add-on, so you only pay for what you need.
Our SLA has four priority tiers. P1 (critical, business stopped, ransomware, servers down, full internet outage): first response in 15 minutes, resolution target 4 business hours. P2 (high, multiple users affected or core service degraded): first response in 1 hour, resolution 8 business hours. P3 (medium, single user affected with workaround): 4 hours response, 2 business days to resolve. P4 (low, cosmetic or general request): 1 business day response, 5 business days to resolve.
Response times apply during business hours (Mon–Fri 09:00–16:00 SAST); out-of-hours support is available on request at agreed call-out rates.
Our primary coverage area is Pretoria, Centurion, Midrand and northern Johannesburg, and we can be on-site the same business day where something's genuinely critical (travel billable). We also take on remote-only clients across South Africa for cloud-first businesses that don't need hands-on infrastructure visits.
On-site visits are billable regardless of location: travel from our HQ to site and back, plus on-site time, at standard rates. For clients outside Gauteng who need regular on-site presence, we can either travel at agreed rates or recommend a trusted local partner. We're deliberately small and would rather be excellent for 25 Gauteng clients than mediocre nationally.
Switching IT providers doesn't have to be painful. Our standard onboarding runs 30 days end-to-end. Week 1: discovery and audit while your current provider stays live, so there's no gap in support. Week 2: we document everything (networks, systems, credentials, vendors) and set up parallel monitoring. Week 3: quiet cutover. Downtime is kept to a minimum and any changes are scheduled out of hours, because we've already validated everything. Week 4: your previous provider is released, we own your environment, and you get your first monthly service report.
Most businesses tell us the hardest part was overthinking it in advance.
Break-fix means you call someone when something breaks, pay by the hour, and hope they're available. It's cheap on paper and expensive in practice: a single ransomware incident or extended outage will cost more than a year of managed services, and break-fix providers have no incentive to prevent incidents because they only earn when things go wrong.
Managed IT is a fixed monthly fee that covers day-to-day remote support, account management, security baseline and reporting, with infrastructure monitoring available as a separately-priced add-on. The provider's incentive flips to keeping things working, because every incident costs them time without extra billing. For any business with more than 10 staff, the maths almost always favours managed over break-fix.
We've tried. Every low-tier offering we've modelled ends up either losing us money or disappointing the client, because the overhead of running MFA, backups, monitoring, patching and a proper helpdesk doesn't scale down below a certain point. Cheaper tiers in this industry usually mean fewer protections and slower responses, which is where most of the real pain comes from.
If budget is tight, the better conversation is scope: fewer users on the agreement, cloud-only infrastructure, no on-site visits. We'd rather do fewer things properly than lots of things badly.
* Products named on this page are examples of the stack we deploy. Actual recommendations depend on your environment, scale, and existing licensing. We have zero commission arrangements with any vendor. Recommendations are made on technical fit alone.