IT Unlimited vs hour banks: the real cost of each model

The price on the proposal is rarely the price of the year. Count what is left out and the downtime too.

• Hour bank You pay for a package of 10, 20 or 50 hours. Each visit uses up balance. When it hits zero, you buy again.
• Capped retainer A monthly fee covers a set number of hours or visits. The excess appears on the next invoice. Call-outs, servers and evenings are often excluded.
• Resident engineer (outsourcing) Someone from the provider is with you one or more days a week. You pay for presence, with or without failures.
• IT Unlimited A fixed monthly fee, no cap on requests, with monitoring, patching, backups and security in the package. It is the only format DataRoad offers, for every client.

With billed hours, a failure is paid for twice: the engineer's hour and the unproductive hour of whoever is waiting. The provider is paid for the repair, not for what it prevents. Monitoring, updating out of hours or replacing a disk before it fails earns it nothing.

Nobody is acting in bad faith. The incentive is simply skewed. The result: the provider only turns up after the problem.

Every plan includes uncounted requests by ticket, phone and remote access, monitoring, update management, managed and tested backups, a monthly report and the client portal. Immediate response times.

• Essential From €395/month + VAT. From 10 workstations. Remote and telephone support only.
• Premium From €750/month + VAT. Unlimited on-site support, managed firewall and antivirus, full estate management.
• Premium 365 From €1,200/month + VAT. Everything in Premium, plus nights, weekends and public holidays, 24/7 support and monitoring and a dedicated account manager.

The final amount follows from the scope and is set in writing. See how we set the price or read the IT Unlimited overview.

What is not in the monthly fee

Hardware and licences: quoted separately, or bought directly by the client. Projects such as cabling, new Wi-Fi or large migrations: quoted separately, with priority for those already under contract. Software development is not included either. And no ad hoc call-outs: the model only holds because every client is inside it.

Ask each provider for written answers. Vague ones say more than good ones.

1. Once the hours run out, what do I pay? If the answer is "by the hour", the advertised monthly fee is only the minimum.
2. A server fails at three in the morning. Who knows? Without monitoring, only your staff, the next morning.
3. When did you last test a backup restore? Without a specific date, assume they do not test.
4. How many engineers know my network? Just one is a single point of failure.
5. How do I leave the contract? A provider confident in its service does not tie the client down.

Add our guide to choosing an MSP in Portugal and the external IT department page, for those weighing an in-house hire.

• Perimeter Which machines, people and sites are covered, and which are not.
• SLA Response and resolution times by priority, and the penalty if they are missed.
• Extras What is billed outside the monthly fee: site visits, evenings, projects.
• Exit Notice period, lock-in and handover of credentials and documentation.
• Reporting What is reported, when and to whom.

At DataRoad, these five points are published for each plan and stated again in the proposal.

A model is judged at the end of the contract. Velv by OnRising grew with us from 90 to around 200 workstations, with firewall, wireless network, servers and connectivity included. Uriach signed IT Unlimited again in Portugal. Neither is held by a lock-in. They stay because they do the maths, including the outages they no longer have.

• 11 years In the market and 232 clients.
• Top 5% PME In Portugal, according to scoring.pt.
• No security incidents At DataRoad in 11 years.

This is the model through which we deliver all our managed IT services.

• 30 workstations: in-house engineer or external contract?
• In-house, external or mixed team

Headquartered in Alfragide with support nationwide. Remote support for companies in Europe and the USA. Local pages: Lisbon, Cascais, Oeiras, Sintra, Leiria, Coimbra and Porto. Full map in service areas.

We read your current provider's proposal and send back the cost of IT Unlimited for your number of workstations. Request a no-commitment proposal. We work only under contract and directly with the end client.

More than 10 workstations · support contract · remote, on-site and telephone support. +351 211 459 950* (weekdays, 9:30–13:00 and 14:00–18:30) · sales@dataroad.pt

*Call to a Portuguese landline.

One Step Ahead of IT.