Business IT support on the Gold Coast is typically charged either hourly or as a flat monthly managed fee. bcom ICT charges $190 + GST per hour ($209.00 inc GST), plus a $100 + GST call-out ($110.00 inc GST) for on-site attendance — so a first hour on site is $290 + GST ($319.00 inc GST), or a fixed $252 inc GST booked online. Remote support carries no call-out. Managed IT is a flat monthly fee calculated from business requirements and services included, quoted after a free review.
Hourly, or a monthly fee
Almost every Australian IT provider works one of these two ways. Which suits you depends on what an hour of downtime costs.
Hourly / break-fix
You pay when something goes wrong. Typically an hourly rate plus a call-out for on-site attendance. Predictable per job, unpredictable per year. Suits simple setups where a problem is an annoyance rather than a crisis.
Managed IT
A flat monthly fee covering monitoring, helpdesk, patching and backup. Predictable per year, more expensive in a quiet month. Suits businesses with a server, staff who can't work without their systems, or client data they'd need to prove is protected.
Our published rates
Billed in hourly half-hour increments after the first hour, agreed before work starts. Remote support carries no call-out, which is why we try remote first wherever the fault allows it.
We publish these because the alternative — "contact us for pricing" — wastes everyone's time and tends to mean the number moves depending on who's asking. See pricing for the full picture including projects.
What drives a managed IT quote
There is no per-seat figure, because two businesses with the same headcount can differ by a factor of three. These are the things that actually move it.
- Do you run a server? On-premise servers carry maintenance, patching and backup that cloud-only businesses simply don't have.
- How old is the hardware? An ageing fleet generates support hours no provider can prevent. Sometimes replacement is the cheaper support strategy.
- How many sites? One office is straightforward. Three sites with connectivity between them is a different job.
- What has to stay available? A business that can lose a morning is priced differently to one that can't lose an hour.
- What compliance applies? AFS licensees, health providers and businesses handling sensitive data need controls and evidence that others don't.
- How documented is it now? An undocumented environment costs more to take on, because the first month is discovery.
Questions worth asking about any quote
What's not included?
Projects, hardware, after-hours work and per-ticket charges are the usual exclusions. "Unlimited support" with a per-ticket fee is not unlimited. Get the boundary in writing.
Is there a minimum term?
A three-year agreement protects the provider. Ask what the term is actually buying you — occasionally it's bundled hardware, more often it isn't.
What's the response commitment?
A monthly fee with no written response target is a subscription, not a service level. Ask for it by priority, in writing.
What happens if we leave?
Whether documentation, credentials and licences get handed over. Worth asking before you join rather than after.
When the honest answer is "you don't need us monthly"
Plenty of Gold Coast businesses are better served by hourly support than by a managed agreement, and we say so regularly. If you have a handful of laptops, everything in the cloud, no server and no compliance obligations, a monthly fee may be buying you very little.
Two things are worth doing regardless of which model you choose: multi-factor authentication on every account, and a backup you have actually watched restore. Between them they prevent most of what genuinely damages a small business, and neither is expensive.
What makes IT cost hard to compare
Six things that obscure the real number, and the questions that reveal each.
“Nobody will give us a number”
Usually an industry habit of quoting only after a meeting. It is sometimes justified and it is mostly a sales technique.
What we do Ask for indicative starting points before agreeing to a meeting. We publish ours on the pricing page so a business can work out whether a conversation is worth having before having one.
“Per-seat pricing sounds fair”
Usually a headcount-based figure applied to businesses that differ enormously underneath. Two businesses with fifteen staff can differ by a factor of three in what they actually need supported.
What we do Price on the environment rather than the headcount. A business with a server, ageing machines and a compliance obligation is a different proposition from fifteen people on modern laptops in the cloud.
“The hourly rate is all we need to compare”
Usually one number from a larger picture. A lower rate on jobs that take twice as long is not cheaper, and a call-out fee changes the arithmetic on short visits.
What we do Compare the cost of the whole job, including call-out and how work is billed in increments. The rate is the most visible number and rarely the decisive one.
“What don’t we know we’re paying for?”
Usually hardware margin, licence markup and project variations — the parts of technology spending that are hardest to see.
What we do Ask directly what a provider earns on hardware and licences. We source at trade pricing and are transparent about what we charge over it, and clients who prefer to buy their own hardware are welcome to.
“Managed IT quotes vary wildly”
Usually genuinely different scopes described with the same words. What is and is not included varies more between providers than the price does.
What we do Get the inclusions and the exclusions in writing before comparing anything. Projects and hardware sitting outside a monthly fee is normal; discovering that after signing is not.
“What does it cost to leave?”
Usually the number nobody asks about at the start and everybody cares about later.
What we do Ask before you sign. Our agreements are month-to-month with documentation and credentials handed over on request, which means the answer is nothing — and it is a fair question to put to anyone.
What this looks like in practice
Representative engagements, drawn from real work with identifying detail removed — we don’t name clients without written permission.
The total was forty per cent higher than anyone thought
The situation
A business asked what it should be spending on technology. Answering that required knowing what it currently spent, which nobody could state. The directors’ working estimate was a monthly figure they had carried for years.
What we found
Technology spending was reaching the business through nine different suppliers and three cost categories. Internet and phone services sat under overheads. Software subscriptions were spread across four corporate cards belonging to different managers. Hardware was capitalised and therefore invisible in monthly reporting. Support was invoiced irregularly. Consolidated, the real annual figure was around forty per cent above the estimate — not because anything was wasteful, but because no single view of it had ever existed.
What we did
Built one register covering every supplier, subscription and capital purchase, with renewal dates and notice periods recorded against each, and set a quarterly review to keep it current.
The outcome
The business could finally decide anything. Whether the total was reasonable turned out to be a much easier question than what the total was, and it had been unanswerable for years.
The cost that was not on any invoice
The situation
A business owner was sceptical that slow computers were worth spending money on, viewing the complaints as staff grumbling about something unavoidable.
What we found
Timed properly, the worst six machines averaged just over twelve minutes each morning from power button to genuinely usable, with repeated pauses through the day. Across fourteen staff that came to roughly forty hours a month of people waiting — considerably more than the cost of fixing it, and entirely invisible because it was spread thinly across every single day and appeared on no invoice anywhere.
What we did
Cleaned up startup on every machine, which recovered several minutes for nothing, then replaced the storage in the six worst with solid state drives rather than replacing the machines themselves.
The outcome
Startup went from twelve minutes to under one. The scepticism had been entirely reasonable right up until somebody put a number against it, which is the only way this particular cost ever becomes visible.
Questions Gold Coast businesses ask us
How much does IT support cost on the Gold Coast?
bcom ICT charges $190 + GST per hour ($209.00 inc GST) for business IT support, plus a $100 + GST call-out ($110.00 inc GST) for on-site attendance — a first hour on site is $290 + GST ($319.00 inc GST), or a fixed $252 inc GST booked online. A remote job of up to an hour is $150 + GST ($165 inc GST) and carries no call-out. Managed IT is a flat monthly fee calculated from your requirements and the services included, quoted after a free review.
Is managed IT cheaper than paying hourly?
In a quiet month, no. Over a year it usually is — and that's before counting staff hours lost to problems nobody is preventing. The real difference is predictability: a flat monthly fee can be budgeted, and you're never weighing up whether a problem is worth a call-out.
Why won't providers publish managed IT prices?
Partly because a single figure would mislead — the same headcount can cost three times as much depending on servers, hardware age, sites and compliance. Partly because some providers prefer the number to be negotiable. Ask for a quote after a proper review rather than a figure over the phone.
Should we pay for a quote or an assessment?
Quoting should be free. A detailed security or systems assessment reasonably carries a fee, but it should be fixed and agreed before it starts, and you should keep the report regardless of what you do next.
What's a reasonable hourly rate for business IT?
It varies with experience and what's included. What matters more than the headline rate is whether the provider tries remote first — remote work with no call-out is often cheaper overall than a lower hourly rate with a call-out attached to every job.
Do we get charged for travel?
We charge a single $100 + GST call-out for on-site attendance across the Gold Coast rather than billing travel time by distance. It's the same figure whether you're in Broadbeach or Coomera.
Related services
Want a real number for your business?
The review is free and the quote is based on what you actually run — not on a headcount and an assumption.