YouGrowIT
Melbourne · 2026
What does IT support actually cost in Melbourne?
Ask this question online and you'll get a dozen articles quoting broad ranges and then inviting you to book a call. Here are the real market numbers, where we sit inside them, and — since we publish everything — exactly what we charge.
No form to fill in first.
The short answer
For a Melbourne small business with no internal IT, fully-managed support is generally published at $100 to $250 per user per month, before GST — roughly $110 to $275 inc GST. Ad hoc hourly work runs about $150 to $250 an hour ex GST.
A ten-person business on a mid-range managed arrangement is therefore looking at somewhere between $1,200 and $2,500 a month.
That's a wide band, and the width is doing a lot of work. Below is what actually moves the number.
Three things that change the price more than anything else
What "support" includes
The cheapest published plans in Australia aren't really support — they're monitoring, patching and antivirus, with your actual help billed by the hour on top. One well-known plan includes three hours of remote help a month; another bills every call at over $200 an hour. Always ask what happens when someone rings.
Servers and equipment
Per-user pricing almost never covers servers, NAS boxes or specialist gear. Those are separate line items across the market, usually $150 to $500 a month per server. A quote that looks cheap per user can land very differently once the server appears.
Contract term and onboarding
A lower monthly rate is often attached to a twelve-month term and a one-off onboarding fee of $1,250 to $4,500. That's not necessarily bad value — but it is part of the price, and it belongs in the comparison.
The bit nobody mentions: most providers won't take you
Published Australian price lists nearly all carry a ten-user minimum, and some set it at twenty-five. In practice that means a monthly floor of roughly $1,100 to $2,300 before you've had a single problem fixed.
So if you're a six-person business ringing around, the answer to "what does it cost" is frequently "more than you'd like, and also we don't do businesses your size". That's rarely said out loud on a website.
It's worth knowing that's structural, not personal. Below about ten seats the economics stop working for a provider carrying a sales team and account managers — which is precisely why we don't carry them.
Why so few providers publish a price
Roughly one Australian managed IT provider in ten publishes an actual price list. The rest publish a guide — an article about what IT support costs, full of ranges, that ends by asking you to book a consultation.
There are honest reasons for that. Every environment differs, and a number quoted without context can be wrong in either direction. But the usual reason is simpler: a price on a website can be compared, and a price given on a call can be adjusted to the room.
We'd rather be compared. If we're not right for you, both of us find out faster.
What we charge
Support packages, per user per month
All inc GST ($55 / $95 / $145 ex GST). Month to month, no lock-in, no onboarding fee.
Pay-as-you-go, per hour
All inc GST. Scheduled out-of-hours work is quoted in advance with no surcharge.
Projects — migrations, security hardening, device enrolment — are priced separately and quoted in writing before anything starts. Project prices are published too.
How that compares
| Per user, per month | Published Australian market | YouGrowIT |
|---|---|---|
| Entry / monitoring level | $40–$85 | $55 |
| Fully managed | $120–$200 | $95 |
| Managed with security extras | $170–$300 | $145 |
| Monthly minimum | $1,090–$2,300 | $300–$750 |
| Hourly, business hours | $150–$250 | $165 |
| Onboarding fee | $1,250–$4,500 | None |
All figures ex GST for a like-for-like comparison, because the Australian market quotes ex GST. Market figures are drawn from published Australian price lists and pricing guides current at 2026; ranges vary by provider and inclusions. Our ex-GST equivalents: $55 / $95 / $145 per user, $165 per hour.
So why are we cheaper?
Because a large part of what a $200-a-seat provider charges isn't the work. It's the sales team that sold you, the account manager who books quarterly meetings, the margin taken on your software licences, and the cost of winning your business spread over a three-year contract.
We don't have those. You talk to the person who does the work. Licences are billed at cost — you pay Microsoft what Microsoft charges. There's no contract to recover the cost of, because there's no contract. And we've never run an ad — almost every client came from a recommendation, which is the cheapest marketing there is.
What that doesn't mean is a thinner service. The technology we deploy is what a much larger company runs: proper identity security, managed devices, tested backup, monitoring that actually alerts someone. The difference is our overhead, not your standards.
When a package isn't worth it
Worth doing the arithmetic honestly. A ten-person business on Managed pays $1,045 a month inc GST. At our hourly rate that's about five and a half hours of work.
If your business genuinely needs less help than that in a typical month and you're happy carrying the risk of nobody watching the backups, pay-as-you-go is cheaper and we'll tell you so. If you're lodging tickets most weeks, a package costs less and you stop thinking about the meter.
The other half of that arithmetic is what a package buys that hours don't: someone patching the machines, testing the backup and watching the sign-ins on the quiet months. That's the value that only shows up on the bad day.
Get a number for your actual business
Tell us how many people you have, whether there's a server, and roughly how often things go wrong. We'll give you a real figure, and we'll tell you if a package isn't worth it for you.
No audit fee, no obligation, and nothing gets touched until you say so.
Comparing us against your current provider? What switching actually involves. Just need one job done? Fixed-price projects.