The "Remote-Only" Trap: When "Unlimited Support" Stops at the Network Edge
Saving $30 per user sounds great until a server fails. Here is the math behind the "Truck Roll" gamble.
In the race to cut IT costs, the "Remote-Only" managed services plan is an attractive contender. By excluding on-site visits, companies can often shave 20-30% off their monthly bill. For a 50-person company, that is a savings of nearly $18,000 a year.
However, this savings is built on a fragile assumption: that every IT problem can be solved over the internet. The reality of hardware failure tells a different story. When a firewall dies, a server won't boot, or a network switch fails, you enter the world of "Billable Dispatch."
The $1,000 Truck Roll
Industry data indicates that the average cost of a single "truck roll" (dispatching a technician to a site) hovers around $1,000 per incident [1]. This fee includes travel time, vehicle costs, and the high hourly rate of a field engineer.
In a Remote-Only contract, every one of these visits is billable. If your office has aging infrastructure, or if you are undergoing a period of growth requiring new workstation setups, these fees accumulate rapidly. As shown in the chart above, for a 20-person company, just one on-site incident per month is enough to make the "cheaper" Remote-Only plan more expensive than the Fully Managed option.
The "Best Effort" Loophole
There is a secondary risk discussed in our Managed IT Pricing Models analysis: priority. In a Remote-Only contract, on-site visits are often classified as "Projects" or "Out of Scope."
This means they do not fall under the standard Service Level Agreement (SLA) for response time. While a Fully Managed client might get a technician on-site within 4 hours for a server outage, a Remote-Only client might wait 2-3 days for the next available "project slot." The cost of that downtime often dwarfs the dispatch fee itself.
The Decision Rule
If your office infrastructure (servers, switches, firewalls) is on-premise and older than 3 years, do not sign a Remote-Only contract. The likelihood of hardware failure is too high. Remote-Only is viable only for "Cloud-Native" companies where the only hardware on-site is the laptop in the user's bag.