How to Choose an IT Support Provider: A Comparison Tool for UK Businesses
The Short Answer
Three IT support quotes are almost never comparable — different pricing models, different inclusions, different definitions of “unlimited”. The practical way to choose is to ask every provider the same closed questions and score the answers. We've built a free tool that does this: 52 questions, automatic scoring, and a three-year cost comparison. It runs entirely in your browser, and we cannot see your answers.
The tool is a single file that runs in your browser with no internet connection — download it, and it works offline. It is deliberately anonymous so that buyers can forward it to the other IT companies quoting them without revealing who else they are speaking to.
Why comparing IT support quotes is so hard
There are four real reasons three quotes rarely line up:
- Different pricing bases — per user, per device, per site, or a fixed monthly fee.
- Different things inside the monthly fee — one provider bundles what another bills separately.
- “Unlimited” qualified by fair-use clauses that only surface when you read the contract.
- One-off costs — onboarding, remediation and exit — that never appear in the monthly figure.
Underneath the pricing sits the question providers would rather you framed as fear. It's worth being precise about the actual risk instead. The Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025/2026 found that 43% of UK businesses identified a breach or attack in the last 12 months — around 612,000 businesses. Breach rates rose with size: 42% of micro businesses, 46% of small, 65% of medium and 69% of large.
But the cost of a typical breach is low. The median perceived cost of the most disruptive breach was £0, and the 25th-to-75th percentile range ran from £0 to £200. Only a minority suffer real harm: businesses reporting loss of revenue or share value rose from 2% to 5% year on year, and reputational damage from 1% to 3%. Meanwhile just 25% of businesses have a formal incident response plan.
Most breaches cost a typical business very little. The risk is not the average, it is the tail: the small number of incidents that take a business off the air for days. What separates providers is not whether they say the word “security” but whether they have the specific things that determine how bad the tail gets — tested backups, immutable copies, an administrator account you control, and a liability position they will show you.
Figures from the Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025/2026, Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and the Home Office, published 30 April 2026. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
What are the different IT support models?
Before you can evaluate providers, it helps to understand the four service models they operate. The model determines whose interests the contract serves, which matters more than the technology involved.
Break-fix (time and materials)
You call when something goes wrong and pay for the hours it takes to fix. No monthly commitment, but costs are unpredictable and the provider only earns when things break.
Retainer
A monthly fee covering a set number of support hours, whether or not you use them. More predictable than break-fix, but you are still buying reactive time rather than outcomes.
Block hours
You buy support hours in advance at a discount and draw them down. Unused hours usually expire, and the provider has an incentive to consume them rather than reduce them.
Managed services
A per-user subscription where the provider is responsible for keeping systems running. The commercial incentive inverts: fewer incidents means better margin for them and less disruption for you.
Many providers blend these models to suit individual requirements. What matters is knowing which one you are actually buying, and whether it rewards your provider for preventing problems or for fixing them.
For a breakdown of how these models translate into monthly cost, see How Much Do Managed IT Services Cost in the UK?
What does the comparison tool actually do?
- 52 questions across seven areas: pricing, what the fee covers, contract and exit, service levels, Microsoft 365 and data ownership, security and accountability, and the team.
- Almost every question is a single click. A few ask for a figure, and those only appear when relevant to the answer given.
- Each answer scores 2, 1 or 0. Unanswered questions score nothing.
- It converts per-user, per-device, per-site and fixed-fee quotes into one comparable monthly figure, and builds a three-year total including onboarding, remediation, anything priced separately, and exit costs.
- Charts: score by section, where the three-year money goes, and score plotted against cost.
- A “points to settle before you sign” list flags specific risks — no Microsoft 365 backup, no independent administrator access, a domain registered in the provider's name, an undisclosed liability cap.
Can the IT companies fill it in themselves?
- 1Open the tool as the buyer and add each provider you're considering.
- 2Either invite them by email to answer for themselves — the tool writes the email, and you choose whether to send a link or attach the page as a file — paste a code they've already sent you, or fill in their column yourself from a meeting or a written proposal.
- 3A provider filling it in sees only their own column — never your notes, never the other quotes.
- 4They send back a short text code. You paste it in and it fills their column.
- 5Scoring happens on your page, from their answers, so a provider cannot send you a flattering total.
The tool carries no branding, and when it writes the invitation email for you it uses a plain file-hosting address with nothing identifying in it — or you can attach the page as a file instead, if you would rather nothing was hosted at all. Nothing your other providers receive tells them where you found this or who else you are speaking to. That is deliberate. A comparison is less useful if everyone being compared can see the scoreboard.
Can Genmar see my answers?
No. There is no server, no account, no login and no tracking in the tool.
- Everything stays in the browser until the user chooses to save a file or send a code.
- Nothing is transmitted to Genmar or to anyone else at any point.
- Anyone can verify this: view the page source, or open it with the network tab in developer tools and watch nothing happen.
- It works with no internet connection at all — download it, disconnect, and it still runs.
We built this, and we may well be one of the providers you're comparing. That's the obvious objection to a comparison tool written by a supplier, so treat it accordingly: verify what you can independently, ignore any question that doesn't matter to your business, and tell us if a question looks weighted in our favour. There are questions in here we do not score full marks on — a 12-month contract term, standard hours rather than 24/7, and Cyber Essentials rather than Cyber Essentials Plus. If we'd written the questions to flatter ourselves, those wouldn't be in there.
You'll notice our name appears nowhere in the tool itself. That's so you can send it to the other companies quoting you without telling them who else is in the running.
How do we answer these questions ourselves?
We'll answer all 52 for any business that asks — a handful depend on the specific environment being quoted, so we answer those in the proposal itself.
Ask us for our answersQuestions to ask an IT support provider
A preview of eight of the sharpest questions, each with one line on why it matters.
Is third-party backup of Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams included in the monthly price?
Why this matters: Microsoft's shared responsibility model makes your data your responsibility. Native retention is not backup.
Will you give us an emergency “break glass” administrator account that we control?
Why this matters: If the provider holds the only route into your systems, you cannot audit them or recover from a dispute.
Do you commit to a fix time for a P1, or only to a response time?
Why this matters: Almost every provider commits to answering. Very few commit to getting you working again.
What is the liability cap in your contract?
Why this matters: Most providers cap liability at a few months' fees. Almost no buyer checks.
Will our Microsoft 365 tenant and domain be registered in our name?
Why this matters: Some providers hold both in theirs.
Do you take a margin on hardware, and what is it?
Why this matters: Every provider does. The question is whether they'll tell you.
Will you show us last quarter's measured response times from your ticketing system?
Why this matters: The gap between the published target and the measured reality is the most revealing number available.
What happens to our bill when a leaver goes?
Why this matters: Some providers add starters immediately but only remove leavers at renewal.
The other 44 questions are in the downloadable comparison tool.
Score your IT support quotes on the same terms
Download the tool, add each provider, and let the scoring and three-year cost comparison do the work. When you want a second opinion, we're happy to talk.