What £55/user actually buys: inside our Baseline package

The most common question we get on a discovery call, usually about ten minutes in, is some variation of: "OK, so for £55 a user — what does that actually get me?"

It's a fair question, and most MSP websites are vague about it on purpose. The vagueness gives sales teams room to discount. We'd rather be specific upfront, because vague pricing produces the worst kind of client relationship — the one where every other email is a discussion about what should and shouldn't be billable.

So here's the line-by-line.

What's in the £55

The Baseline package is one bundle, sold one way, at one price. The components below all come together — we don't sell them separately, because diagnosing a real-world IT problem (a phishing click, a slow laptop, a strange login from Sofia at 3am) requires telemetry from all of them.

1. Unlimited business-hours helpdesk

Tickets answered by the same four named Manchester engineers — Brett, Simon, Ben and Reece. No offshore tier-one. No "we'll get back to you within 24 hours" emails. Critical issues acknowledged within 15 minutes during business hours (8am–6pm Mon–Fri); typically much faster. Phone, email, portal, or Teams chat — whichever way you prefer to reach us.

2. Microsoft 365 administration

User and licence management, group memberships, distribution lists, shared mailboxes, SharePoint and Teams configuration, OneDrive policies, Exchange Online tuning, Defender for Office 365 baseline. We're a Microsoft Solutions Partner, so when something is unusual we have a direct escalation path that most resellers don't.

3. Device monitoring, patching and management (RMM)

Every Windows laptop and desktop joined to our remote monitoring and management platform. Operating system patches, third-party application patches (Chrome, Adobe, Zoom and the rest), security baseline enforcement, hardware health monitoring, and remote control when we need to fix something without dragging the user away from their work. Macs covered too, with the same baseline.

4. Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)

Modern endpoint protection — not just legacy antivirus. Detects ransomware behaviour, isolates compromised devices automatically, and gives us a forensic trail when something does land. We use Microsoft Defender for Endpoint as standard because it integrates cleanly with the rest of the M365 estate and avoids the agent-on-agent pile-up of bolted-on third-party tools.

5. Identity hardening

Multi-factor authentication enforced on every account. Conditional access policies that block sign-ins from countries you don't operate in, require MFA from unfamiliar locations, and block legacy authentication protocols. Password policies aligned to NCSC guidance (length over rotation). Quarterly review of admin role assignments. The single biggest reduction in attack surface for any SMB, done properly.

6. Backup verification and monitoring

We verify your Microsoft 365 backups are running, healthy, and restorable. (Microsoft doesn't back up your data — they have geo-redundancy for their service, not your files.) If you don't have a third-party M365 backup, we'll recommend one and add it as a pass-through. We test restores quarterly, not annually like the contract says.

7. Monthly reporting

You get one report a month showing ticket volume, response and resolution times, patching compliance across the fleet, security incidents (if any), licence position, and what we'd flag for the next month. Plain English, not a vendor dashboard dump.

8. Quarterly business review (QBR)

Once a quarter we sit down with you (in person if you're in Greater Manchester, on Teams otherwise) and walk through where IT is and where it should go in the next 90 days. Roadmap, budget, risks, opportunities. This is where most of the genuinely useful work happens — most clients can't remember what was on their ticket queue last month, but they remember what we agreed to fix in the QBR.

What's not in the £55

Equally important. If you're comparing us to a £75-£95 quote from another MSP, this is the bit where the difference usually lives.

• Microsoft 365 licences. We pass these through at our cost — typically £18.10/user/month for Business Premium, less for Standard. Some MSPs build margin into licences; we don't. If you want to buy direct from Microsoft, you can — we'll just admin them for you.
• 24/7 SOC monitoring. Real out-of-hours security monitoring with humans on the other end is genuinely expensive. It sits in our Complete tier (£85/user) for clients that need it. Most 10-30 seat businesses don't.
• Advanced compliance tooling. Information protection, encryption policy enforcement, DLP, Cyber Essentials audit support — that's our Plus tier (£70/user). If you're not facing a regulator or a tender that requires Cyber Essentials, Baseline covers you.
• Email Protect Pro. Advanced email security beyond what Defender for Office 365 ships with — anti-impersonation, AI phishing detection, link rewriting. Sits in Complete.
• Project work. Anything that's a one-off lift — office moves, server refreshes, M365 tenant migrations, network re-builds, new starter laptop builds at scale — is quoted as a fixed-price project. We send a one-page scope, you sign it, we deliver. No "is this in or out of contract?" arguments.
• On-premise servers. If you've still got a physical server (and plenty of small Manchester businesses do), it's £95/server/month on top of any tier. That covers the same monitoring, patching and security baseline we apply to endpoints.
• Hardware procurement. We'll source laptops, monitors, peripherals at trade prices and pass them through with a clear margin shown on the quote — usually 8-12% to cover the procurement and configuration work. You don't have to buy through us; some clients prefer to use leasing or their own supplier.

Why we don't unbundle it

This comes up roughly once a month: "Can we just take the user support side and skip the device management, because we use a leasing company who handle hardware?"

We always say no, and it's not a sales tactic. The user side and the device side of an IT operating model only work together. When something goes wrong, the diagnosis lives across both. If we can see the user-side telemetry (mailbox rules, sign-in patterns, M365 audit log) but not the device-side (running processes, patch level, EDR alerts), we're guessing at half the problem.

We tried it years ago. Tickets would land, we'd fix the user-side issue, and three weeks later the same problem would resurface because nobody had patched the underlying device. It was treating symptoms, and the clients weren't happy either — they were paying for outcomes (working IT) and getting outputs (closed tickets). Longer post on that here, if it's relevant.

How to compare us to another quote

If you're sitting on two or three MSP quotes right now, here's the four-question filter that actually matters:

1. Are M365 licences passed through at cost, or marked up? Mark-up is fine if it's disclosed; ask either way.
2. Is there a setup or onboarding fee on the lowest tier? We don't charge one on Baseline. Some MSPs charge £500-£2,000 for "first 30 days".
3. What's the engineer-to-user ratio? A £55 quote with one engineer per 250 users is meaningfully different from a £75 quote with one per 80. We're at one per ~40 right now.
4. What happens when something breaks at 7pm on a Tuesday? If they say "24/7 cover included" at £55, ask who's actually on the phone. Many quotes that include "24/7" mean a third-party answering service that takes a message and forwards it to the engineer in the morning. That's not the same thing.

If you'd like a side-by-side comparison sheet against any specific quote you've received, send it over and we'll do an honest line-by-line — including the bits where the other quote is genuinely better.