At some point in every growing business, someone asks the question: should we just hire an IT person? On the surface, it sounds sensible. You'd have someone on-site, someone who "knows the business", someone the team can grab in the kitchen. In practice, the maths and the coverage rarely work out the way you'd hope — especially for businesses under 50 people.
Here's an honest side-by-side comparison to help you make the right call.
The real cost of hiring in-house
A competent IT generalist in the UK in 2026 costs roughly:
- Salary: £30,000 - £45,000 for a mid-level all-rounder
- Employer NI and pension: add ~15%
- Holiday, sick and training cover: add ~10%
- Tools and licences (RMM, ticketing, monitoring, security stack): £3,000 - £6,000 a year
- Recruitment: £3,000 - £8,000 to find them in the first place
All in, you're looking at £45,000 - £60,000 for one person. And that's one person — with one set of skills, who takes annual leave, who gets ill and who can only be in one place at once.
The real cost of outsourced support
On a per-user model, a 15-person business on Dynamiti One would pay:
- £15 per employee, per month on an annual plan = £225 / month (~£2,700 a year)
- £16.50 per employee, per month monthly + £50 one-off onboarding
Even a 40-person team lands at around £7,200 a year — a fraction of a single in-house hire, and you get a whole team behind it instead of one individual.
What you actually get for the money
In-house
- One person, physically present (some of the time)
- Deep knowledge of your specific setup
- Availability limited by their calendar and holidays
- Skill set limited to whatever they personally know
- You are their line manager, their HR, their trainer
Outsourced
- A team of engineers with overlapping specialisms (security, networking, Microsoft 365, backups, procurement)
- Coverage that doesn't disappear when one person is on holiday
- Tools and monitoring already licensed and included
- Predictable monthly cost
- Someone else handles their training, tools and cover
The hidden trade-offs nobody mentions
In-house sounds close, but often isn't. In a small business, the "IT person" quickly becomes the printer person, the phone person and the AV-in-the-meeting-room person. Strategic work rarely happens.
Outsourced sounds distant, but often isn't. Modern remote support tools mean an engineer can be on a laptop within minutes, often faster than walking down the corridor to find a colleague who's in a meeting.
One person is a single point of failure. If your only IT person leaves, is ill or goes on holiday, you have no IT function. That risk is invisible until the day it isn't.
When does in-house actually make sense?
Hiring an in-house IT lead usually stops being an unnecessary expense somewhere around 75-100 staff, and only then if you have complex bespoke systems, on-site infrastructure or regulatory needs that genuinely require someone at a desk. Even then, most businesses of that size run a hybrid model: an internal IT manager who owns strategy, plus an outsourced partner who handles day-to-day support, out-of-hours cover and specialist work.
The honest recommendation
For most UK businesses under 50 people, outsourced support wins on cost, coverage and capability. You get more expertise, more resilience and fewer things falling through the cracks — all for less than a fifth of what a single hire would cost.
If you want to see the numbers for your team size, use the pricing slider on the Dynamiti One page. It'll take you thirty seconds and there's no form at the end of it.
The hybrid option most small businesses miss
It is rarely a binary choice. Many businesses under fifty staff get the best result by keeping one internal person who understands the business inside out, and pairing them with an outsourced provider who handles out of hours cover, deep technical work, and holiday absence. That person becomes the translator between the business and the provider, and the provider gives them the backup they need to sleep at night.
Questions to ask before you decide
Before choosing a model, get clear on a few things. How often do you actually need hands on support each week? How comfortable are you carrying the risk of one person leaving? How much of your budget do you want tied up in salary versus a flexible contract? How specialised is your setup? Honest answers to these questions usually point clearly to one model or the other.
Reviewing the decision as you grow
The right answer at ten staff is often the wrong answer at forty. Revisit the question every year or two, especially after big changes such as opening a new location, moving to a new product line, or bringing on a large customer. What worked last year may already be holding you back.
A note on culture
However you resource IT, the team behind it needs to feel like part of your business. Internal staff need to feel connected to leadership. Outsourced providers need to know your priorities and your people. When either of those breaks down, service quality drops fast, regardless of the model on paper.