“An IT person's monthly salary or a subscription with a support company?” — this is roughly the first calculation any administrator makes on reaching this question. It is also the first wrong calculation: it compares two figures that do not contain the same things. The salary is not the employee's cost, and the subscription is not necessarily the whole cost of outsourcing.
This article does not hand you a verdict — for some companies the in-house employee really is the right choice — but gives you the complete spreadsheet: every cost line for each option, over a three-year horizon, plus the risks no spreadsheet captures. At the end you will be able to do the sums on your company's numbers, not ours: deliberately, you will find no “market average” amounts here, because the only figures that matter are those in the job adverts you would answer and the quotes you would receive.
Why the one-month comparison lies
The costs of the two options have different rhythms. With an employee, the expenses come in waves: recruitment at the start, equipment and training in the first months, holidays every year, and at two or three years — statistically speaking, at some point — the departure, which restarts the whole cycle from zero. With outsourcing, the cost is almost flat: the monthly subscription, plus one-off projects. A comparison over a single “quiet” month automatically favours the employee; one over three years, waves included, shows the reality. That is why the correct horizon is multi-year.
The full cost of the in-house employee
The lines you put in the “in-house” column, year by year:
- The employer's total payroll cost. Not the net salary, not even the gross in the advert: ask your accountant for the “total employer cost” figure for that gross — it is higher than the gross and it is the only correct figure for the calculation.
- Recruitment. Your and your colleagues' time for interviews, a possible agency fee, plus the months the role sits uncovered. Good IT people are hard to find across the whole country, not just in the big cities.
- Equipment and tools. Laptop, licences, administration and monitoring tools — which a services company already owns, but your employee will request.
- Continuous training. IT technologies change quickly; a person who does not train constantly becomes, within a few years, a cost that no longer covers today's risks. Budget courses and certifications every year.
- Absences. Annual leave, sick days, courses: in total, a few weeks a year in which the company is left without IT or pays for external cover. Write explicitly into the calculation who stands in.
- Turnover. If the person leaves in year two or three, you pay again for recruitment, the coverage gap and the replacement's months of settling in. It is not a certainty, but it is a risk with real probability — treat it as a weighted cost line, not as an optimistic assumption.
The full cost of outsourcing
The “external” column has fewer lines, but demands a careful read of the contract:
- The monthly subscription — the figure in the quote, multiplied by 36 months.
- What the subscription does not include. This is where the differences between offers hide: on-site interventions, hours above the cap, projects (migrations, new implementations), equipment. Ask for the excluded list in writing and estimate how much of it you will realistically consume in a year.
- The initial transition. Taking over the infrastructure, documenting it, any urgent fixes discovered at the start — usually a one-off effort, at the beginning.
- The response terms. The guaranteed response time (SLA) per urgency level is part of the price: a cheap subscription with a “when we can” response costs you at the first serious incident. The questions worth asking before signing — including about termination and the handover of documentation on exit — are laid out at the frequently asked questions about prices and contracts.
What no spreadsheet captures
Three structural differences that have no row in Excel, but often decide the outcome:
One person versus a team. Modern IT administration requires skills from different areas: networking, security, licences, cloud, backup, plus the compliance obligations that have multiplied — from e-Factura with its 5-business-day deadline to SAF-T and the D406 return, which directly involve the company's systems. You rarely find all these skills in one person, at any salary.
Continuity. The in-house employee takes holidays, falls ill, resigns. An external team does not disappear in a single day — continuity is precisely the product it sells.
The single point of failure. The most underestimated risk: the passwords, the configurations and the history of decisions live in one person's head. When they leave — especially on bad terms — the company discovers how little of its IT is documented. Ask for written documentation whichever option you choose; with outsourcing, put it in the contract.
The 3-year spreadsheet, step by step
- Make two columns: “in-house” and “external”, over 36 months.
- In-house: total employer cost × 36, plus recruitment (once, at the start), annual equipment and licences, annual training, cover for absences and the turnover risk weighted by your own judgement.
- External: the subscription × 36, plus the initial transition and realistic consumption of the services not included.
- Under each column, add the unquantifiable risks above — at least as a list, so they weigh in the decision.
- Before anything else, measure the real volume: count for a whole month the IT requests in the company — from “the printer doesn't work” to system failures. Many companies of 10–50 employees discover that their real volume does not fill a full-time person; others discover the opposite. That figure decides everything.
When the in-house employee is the right choice
To be clear that there is no single answer: in-house usually wins where the measured volume realistically fills a full-time role, where the nature of the business requires daily physical presence — production with connected machinery, for example — or where a critical internal system needs someone dedicated exclusively to it. And there is the hybrid variant, common in practice: one in-house person for daily operations, plus an external contract for the specialisations a single person cannot cover — security, projects, load peaks.
The next step
Start with the one-month measurement of request volume, then fill in the two columns with real figures: the gross from the active job adverts for the role you need and two or three concrete outsourcing quotes. The calculation takes one evening — the decision remains yours. If you want to see exactly what a services contract would include for your company, ask for a detailed structure on the IT outsourcing page.