5 Ways “Cheaper-Priced” IT Firms Hide The TRUE Cost Of Their Services In Their Contracts

If you look through a dozen proposals from IT services firms, here’s what you’ll quickly discover: no two are alike. This makes it nearly impossible to compare one against the other and sort through all the legalese, “geek speak” and terms to determine if you’re getting a fair price or if you’re falling victim to a misleading proposal that will end up costing you far more than you were initially led to believe.

If you’re not careful, the “cheapest” or less expensive IT provider can end up costing you a lot more due to carve-outs and hidden fees in their contracts that they will later nickel-and-dime you over, or by quoting inadequate solutions that you’ll later need to pay to upgrade.

Here are 5 common things “cheaper” IT companies leave out of their initial proposal to fool you:

1. Adequate cyber security protections are NOT included. More specifically, you need to make sure the IT company you’re talking to isn’t just putting a basic (cheap) antivirus software on your network and calling it done. Antivirus is good but woefully insufficient to protect you. In fact, insurance companies are now requiring protection such as employee cyber-awareness training, 2FA (2-factor authentication) and what’s called “advanced endpoint protection” just to get insurance coverage for cyber liability and crime insurance. We provide those standard in our offering, so not only do you greatly reduce your chances of a cyber-attack, but you also avoid being denied an important insurance claim (or denied coverage, period).
2. All disaster recovery services and setup are NOT included. Make sure your IT company includes nightly off-site backups of your servers, workstations and Office 365 (if you use that technology). Another question to ask is, if your server, workstations and data were destroyed, would they charge you extra to restore them?
3. Support outside of normal business hours and on-site visits is NOT included. This is another area that takes many business owners by surprise: all after-hours and on-site visits involve an extra fee. They might also charge you extra to set up a workstation for a new employee in addition to the support fees and extra for any type of normal and customary support pertaining to Office 365, such as setting up shared mailboxes, distribution lists, spam and security settings and more. We include ALL of this in our agreements so you aren’t nickel-and-dimed for every request.
4. Vendor liaison and management is NOT included. Some IT firms will charge you hourly to resolve issues with your phone system, ISP, security cameras, printers and other devices they didn’t sell you but that still reside on the network (and give you technical problems). As a client of ours, you get all of that INCLUDED, not charged extra.
5. Support for computers outside of warranty involve an EXTRA fee. Another little “gotcha” you might not notice is that many IT companies will charge you extra for any support or troubleshooting if the computer they are working on is outside the warranty period. While we certainly advise replacing any computer that is 5+ years old or no longer safe to use, we won’t charge you extra for supporting a PC because it is past the warranty expiration.