In-House IT vs. MSP: The Real Cost Comparison for a 50-Person Company

A managed service provider gives a 50-person company more IT coverage per dollar than a first in-house hire, and the gap widens once the comparison includes everything beyond salary. In-house wins in a few specific situations, covered below. The math is anchored at 50 people because that is the size where this decision comes up most often, but the structure of the comparison holds the same way at 10 people and at 150.

Here is how the two options compare on the costs that actually land on your P&L.

The Headline Number: Salary vs. Subscription

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median annual wage for network and computer systems administrators at $99,130 as of May 2025. Benefits, payroll taxes, and equipment typically add an estimated 25 to 40 percent on top of base salary, which puts the fully loaded cost of a single mid-level IT hire well into six figures.

An MSP prices per user instead. Using ScaleIt's published plans as a concrete anchor:

• Essentials at $79 per user per month covers 50 people for $47,400 a year
• Business+ at $129 per user per month covers 50 people for $77,400 a year
• Premium at $199 per user per month, with 24/7 coverage, runs $119,400 a year

The full-company bill on the mid-tier plan lands below the fully loaded cost of one hire, and it buys the working hours of a team rather than a single person.

What the Salary Does Not Include

The in-house number on the offer letter is the floor, not the total. The real comparison includes:

• Recruiting. Sourcing, interviewing, and closing an IT hire takes months of calendar time and either agency fees or a meaningful slice of a founder's attention.
• Management. Someone senior now owns this person's priorities, reviews, and growth. That overhead comes out of leadership time.
• Tooling and training. Monitoring, ticketing, and device-management platforms carry their own licenses, and certifications need budget to stay current.
• Ramp time. A new hire spends their first months learning your stack before output arrives.

MSP pricing bundles those costs into the per-user rate. The tooling, the management structure, and the trained staff exist on day one.

Coverage and Continuity

One in-house admin is one set of working hours in one time zone. Vacation, sick days, and eventual resignation all pause your IT function, and the documentation of how everything works often lives in one head.

An MSP is staffed as a team. Response times are committed in the contract, coverage continues when any individual is out, and your environment is documented as a condition of the service model. When you compare costs, you are comparing a single point of dependency against a structure built for continuity.

Depth Across the Stack

A 50-person company runs the same categories of systems a 500-person company does, in smaller quantities: identity and SSO, device management, security controls like MFA and access reviews, SaaS administration, and now AI tooling. One generalist hire covers some of those areas well and learns the rest on your time.

An MSP spreads that surface across people who each work in their area every day, across many client environments. The pattern that fixed an Okta or Google Workspace issue at another client this week is available to you the same day.

How the Cost Scales With Headcount

Per-user pricing moves in both directions. Hire 10 people and the bill grows by a known amount; run leaner and it shrinks. You can price next year's plan from next year's headcount with arithmetic.

A salary is a step function. The hire costs the same whether they support 35 people or 55, and the moment the workload exceeds one person, the next step is a second full salary. Configuring for scale from day one favors the model that scales in $79 to $199 increments, and if you started with an early IT hire who is now stretched thin, moving the routine load to an MSP is a common and clean correction.

Recommended Pick by Profile

Pick an MSP if: you have no dedicated IT function yet, IT work is currently a founder's or ops leader's side duty, you want committed response times without building a team, or your headcount is moving in either direction fast enough that a fixed salary is an awkward fit. This describes most companies between 10 and 150 people.

Consider in-house when: your scale already justifies several full-time IT roles, a regulatory or physical-security requirement demands on-site staff, or infrastructure is itself your product and IT knowledge is core intellectual property. These conditions are real but rare at 50 people.

The common path: start with an MSP, and if you later add an internal IT lead, have them direct strategy while the MSP keeps running the day-to-day queue. The two models stack well; they are rarely an either-or forever.

Want the coverage of a full IT team at a per-user price? ScaleIt runs managed IT support for startups and SMBs, from help desk to identity, devices, and AI tooling. Book a free call and we will price out your exact headcount and tool stack.

Verified against U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook wage data (May 2025) and ScaleIt published plan pricing on 2026-09-08. Sources: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/network-and-computer-systems-administrators.htm, https://2scaleit.com/plans.