A number you can budget, a scope you can read
Managed IT pricing is usually deliberately opaque: a bespoke quote per prospect, an inclusions list that shifts, and the discovery three months in that onsite attendance was never actually included.
Ours is published. Three tiers, a per-user monthly price on two of them, and a comparison table that states what each one contains. Four-hour onsite response is in every tier, because a support contract that cannot put a person in the building is a helpdesk, not a managed service.
Underneath, the scope runs from supply to end of life: we buy the hardware, stage it at our warehouse, install it, support it, secure it, refresh it and retire it with certificates. One provider, one asset record, one monthly invoice.
Per-user pricing also behaves sensibly as headcount moves, which matters more than the headline rate. The count is trued up monthly against your directory rather than fixed at contract signature, so a hiring freeze reduces the bill and a growth quarter does not need a renegotiation. Leavers come off at the next cycle, and their devices come back through our warehouse rather than staying on your asset register as ghosts.
The commercial logic is that our incentive should match yours. A provider paid per ticket earns more when your estate is unstable; a provider paid per user earns more when it is not. That is why the monthly pack leads on volume trend rather than tickets closed, and why the operating rhythm below spends most of its effort on the work that stops tickets happening.
Pick the tier, read the inclusions
Essentials
Professional
Enterprise
| ESSENTIALS | PROFESSIONAL | ENTERPRISE | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | £50 per user / month | £100 per user / month | Custom, scoped per estate |
| Company size guide | Up to ~50 users | ~50 to 250 users | 250+ users or multi-country |
| Devices per user | Up to 2 | Up to 3 | Unlimited, agreed per estate |
| Onboarding assistance | Standard onboarding hours | Extended onboarding hours | Dedicated transition project |
| Dedicated account manager | Shared account team | Named account manager | Service delivery manager |
| Dedicated desk agent | Shared pod | Priority queue | Dedicated pod, named agents |
| Dedicated field worker | Shared field capacity | 24/7 onsite entitlement | Dedicated or resident onsite |
| vCIO cadence | Annual review | Quarterly roadmap and budget | Monthly or per programme |
| Vendor management | On request | Included | Included, with contract calendar |
| Budget preparation | Not included | Annual budget input | Multi-year planning |
| Asset & inventory cadence | Annual audit | Quarterly audit | Monthly reconciliation |
| Reporting depth | Monthly SLA pack | Monthly pack plus QBR | Custom, plus compliance reporting |
Prices are per user per month and a minimum term applies. Four-hour onsite response is included in every tier; the difference between tiers is the coverage window and whether the capacity is shared or dedicated. Final inclusions are confirmed in the service schedule.
The floor, regardless of tier
24x7x365 monitoring
Servers, network, endpoints and cloud platforms watched continuously, with alerts opening tickets automatically at the right priority rather than landing in an inbox.
24/7 remote desk
A human answers at any hour, in 20 languages, from our own delivery offices on follow-the-sun shifts.
Four-hour onsite response
A directly-employed worker on site within four hours, carrying spares from the nearest of our nineteen owned hubs.
Patching, Microsoft and third party
A cadence that is held and reported per device, not a policy that exists on paper and a console percentage nobody checks.
Monthly executive report
Attainment, volume, trend and risk in a document written to be read by a board rather than by an engineer.
ITIL discipline
Incident, request, problem and change management, with change advisory board approval on anything touching production.
Portal access
Live SLA clocks, ticket history, asset records and invoices - visible whenever you want them, without asking us for a report.
Asset register
Every device recorded from purchase order through deployment and support to disposal certificate, as one continuous record.
What happens, and how often
Daily
The shift starts by reading the overnight handover, not by opening the queue cold.
Weekly
The maintenance heartbeat. Most of what prevents incidents happens in this window.
Monthly
The reporting and reconciliation cycle. This is where the estate stays honest.
Quarterly
The business conversation. Strategy, budget and the improvement plan.
The cadence is contracted rather than aspirational. If a patch window is missed or a monthly pack is late, that is a service-level miss recorded against us in the same system that records a breached ticket - because a provider who quietly stops doing the preventative work looks identical to one who is doing it, right up until the outage.
Seven stages to business as usual
The riskiest month of a managed-service contract is the first one. It is run as a project with a success metric, not as a start date.
The stage most providers skip is discovery, and it is the one that decides whether the rest works. Undocumented dependencies, admin credentials held by a departed contractor, licences renewing next month that nobody has budgeted, a backup that has been failing silently - these are found in week one or they are found during an incident. We would rather deliver an uncomfortable discovery report than a comfortable start date.
The shadow period is the second thing worth insisting on. Working your live queue without owning it teaches us the estate under real conditions: which applications generate the most calls, which sites have access problems, which users need handling differently. A provider who goes straight from contract to cutover is learning those things at your expense.
Where an incumbent is being replaced we manage the relationship professionally throughout - they keep working while we shadow, and cutover happens on a date both sides know. Where staff transfer under TUPE or a local equivalent, that runs as its own workstream with consultation support, and we are explicit about where a transfer applies and where it does not.
The lifecycle behind the subscription
Managed IT is the operating layer. These are the services underneath it, each contractable on its own - and the reason a managed contract with us covers more than a ticket queue.
The practical difference shows up at the joins. A device that fails is swapped from spares we hold in your country, the faulty unit returns to our warehouse for warranty claim or disposal, and the replacement was already registered for zero-touch enrolment when it was purchased - so the user is working the same day and the asset register never diverges from reality. With separate suppliers each of those steps is a handover, and each handover is where the day goes.
Add-ons
Security bundle
Vulnerability scanning, user awareness training, and managed detection and response with SOC cover.
Teams Voice
Numbers, call queues and handsets, deployed and supported as part of the estate.
Project credits
A pre-agreed pool of project days drawn down for migrations, office moves and refreshes.
Additional-site packs
Priced increments for new offices or stores, including survey, install and BAU onboarding.
What the monthly pack shows
Volume falling quarter on quarter is the point of proactive management. Monitoring catches the failures that would have become tickets, and problem management removes the causes behind repeat incidents rather than re-solving them each month. On most estates the largest single reduction comes in the second quarter, once the first round of problem records closes and the knowledge base has absorbed the recurring questions.
A flat trend is a conversation we start rather than one we wait for you to raise. It usually means one of four things, and the monthly pack is structured to tell them apart: an ageing device population generating hardware faults faster than problem management can remove causes; a business change such as a new site or application adding genuine new demand; a knowledge-base gap where the same question keeps arriving because the answer was never published; or a problem record that has been raised and never resourced. Each has a different remedy and a different owner, so naming which one it is matters more than reporting the flat line.
CSAT is measured on every closed ticket rather than sampled, and patch compliance is measured per device against the agreed baseline rather than reported as a console average - because an average hides the twenty machines that never take an update, which are exactly the twenty that matter.
Priorities, and the onsite line
| PRIORITY | DEFINITION | RESPONSE | ONSITE | TARGET RESOLUTION |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| P1 - Critical | Service down, site or revenue-critical system unavailable | 15 minutes | Within 4 hours | 4 hours |
| P2 - High | Major degradation or a group of users affected | 30 minutes | Within 4 hours where needed | 8 hours |
| P3 - Medium | Single user or non-critical function impaired | 2 hours | Next business day | Next business day |
| P4 - Low | Request, change or scheduled work | 8 hours | By arrangement | 5 business days |
Four-hour onsite response is included in every tier. Essentials covers it in business hours; Professional and Enterprise extend it to the contracted window, up to 24/7. Measured in Cogent OS against the site's local working calendar and reported monthly.
The onsite line is the one worth reading closely when comparing providers. A response target only means something if the person attending is employed by the company you signed with and the part is already in the country - otherwise a four-hour promise resolves to a four-hour phone call followed by a next-day courier. Ours is backed by directly-employed workers in nineteen country entities and spares held at the owned hub nearest your sites, and where a specific site is too remote for the target we say so during scoping rather than signing and missing it.
Service credits, where contracted, are calculated from the same records visible to you in the portal. You are not asked to accept our figure for attainment, and a disputed ticket can be opened and inspected rather than argued from two different spreadsheets.
Questions buyers ask
Can this be co-managed with our own IT person or team?
Yes, and for firms with one internal hire it is usually the right answer. We take the desk, the monitoring, the patching and the field visits; your person keeps the relationships, the projects and the business knowledge. The RACI is agreed in writing at the outset so neither side assumes the other is covering something.
Is there a minimum number of seats?
There is a practical floor rather than a hard rule - below roughly ten users the per-user model stops making sense and we would quote a small-estate package instead. We would rather tell you that than sell you a tier you are too small to benefit from.
What contract term applies?
A minimum term applies to the per-user tiers, typically twelve months, because transition carries real cost on both sides. Enterprise engagements are scoped with their own term. Exit assistance is a contractual deliverable in every case, not a negotiation at the end.
What exactly counts as onsite?
A directly-employed Cogent worker attending your premises to perform work that cannot be done remotely - hardware replacement, network faults, deskside support, installations and moves. Travel within the standard service area is included; genuinely remote locations are priced transparently at scoping rather than refused later.
How does out-of-hours work?
The remote desk is 24/7 in every tier. Onsite out-of-hours attendance is included in the Professional and Enterprise windows and available on Essentials as a chargeable call-out. Public holidays vary by country and the applicable calendar is recorded per site.
What happens to our data and documentation if we leave?
You receive asset and CMDB records, full ticket history, runbooks and configuration documentation in portable formats, plus transition support to the incoming provider. We write documentation on the assumption that someone else may inherit it, which is also why it is usable while we are still there.
Who you actually deal with
Managed IT is sold as a platform and delivered by people. On an Essentials account that is a shared pod who learn your estate; on Professional a named account manager and a priority queue; on Enterprise a service delivery manager, a dedicated pod and, where it earns its cost, a resident worker on your site.
In every tier they are Cogent employees on a Cogent payroll in the country they work in, background-verified, with their certifications and clearances tracked in the platform. You meet them, and they stay - which is the part that actually determines whether year two is better than year one.
Other service lines in this practice
Want a number for your estate?
Tell us the user count, the sites and the current pain. We will come back with the tier, what transition looks like and the monthly price.