Ad-hoc support is cheaper per incident. That is not the question. The question is how many incidents your office generates in a year, because that single number decides which option costs less. This post is the calculation.
The Two Cost Structures
Ad-hoc (break-fix). You pay per incident, nothing otherwise. A repair visit in Delhi NCR runs roughly ₹500-2,000 per hour with a one-hour minimum, plus travel. Cheap calls sit at the bottom of that: a jammed printer head, a failed power-supply cable, a machine that needs re-imaging. Anything involving a part moves fast. A laptop screen replacement runs ₹6,000-25,000 by model. A desktop hard drive is ₹3,000-6,000. A printer board is ₹2,500-8,000.
Managed. One fixed monthly number. A small office typically pays ₹2,000-10,000 per month, so ₹24,000-1,20,000 a year for a 10 to 30 seat team. The fee does not move whether you had one bad week or a clean month.
What an Incident Really Costs
The invoice is only part of it. Build a blended figure:
- Technician time including travel: 1 to 1.5 hours
- Parts, where the fault is hardware
- Your own coordination time, roughly half an hour
For an office whose calls are mostly software, mail and configuration, blended cost lands at ₹1,500-3,000 per incident. If you replace parts regularly, it lands at ₹5,000-8,000.
Then add what nobody invoices: blocked user time. A receptionist who cannot print invoices for two hours is not a free incident.
The Break-Even Calculation
The formula is short enough to do on a napkin:
Annual AMC cost ÷ blended cost per incident = break-even incident count per year
Take an IT AMC quoted at ₹6,000 a month, which is ₹72,000 a year. At a blended ₹2,500 per incident, the crossover is 29 incidents a year, or about 2.4 a month.
At a blended ₹5,000 per incident, the same ₹72,000 breaks even at 14 incidents a year, or roughly one a month.
So the rule is simple: if you are logging more than two incidents a month, ad-hoc is already the expensive option.
Rough incidents per year, per office size:
- 1 to 3 users: 4 to 6
- 10 users: 15 to 25
- 25 users: 35 to 60
- 50 users with a file server: 60 to 100+
Anything above 20 users is comfortably past the break-even line, which is why managed IT services rarely need a hard sell at that size.
A Worked Monthly Example
A 12-person office with 25 devices, comparing three years’ worth of incident volume against one AMC price.
| Scenario | Incidents per year | Ad-hoc cost | AMC cost | Cheaper option |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Quiet year | 12 | ₹36,000 | ₹72,000 | Ad-hoc, by ₹36,000 |
| Normal year | 36 | ₹90,000 | ₹72,000 | AMC, by ₹18,000 |
| Rough year | 72 | ₹1,80,000 | ₹72,000 | AMC, by ₹1,08,000 |
Now the part that matters. In the rough year, most of that ₹1,80,000 was three events: a server failure, two laptop screens and a printer board. One server down for a working day costs more in lost trading than a full year of AMC fees. Ad-hoc looks cheap in the quiet year and catastrophic in the year you actually need insurance.
Where the Arithmetic Breaks Down
The numbers assume every visit is equal. It is not:
- Waiting time. Ad-hoc means the technician comes when free. No escalation path, so a five-minute fix can take two days of back-and-forth.
- Every new vendor re-learns your setup. Passwords, file shares, print queues, Tally data paths. You pay that discovery cost every time.
- Nothing preventive happens. The same misconfiguration returns every quarter, at full price.
- No accountability. A misdiagnosis carries no consequence, so the fault can repeat with nobody owning it.
- One big failure dwarfs everything. This is the asymmetry the table cannot show.
The Practical Test Before You Sign
Run a one-line incident log for eight weeks: date, symptom, hours lost, amount spent. Multiply by 4.5 to annualise.
If that projected spend sits above roughly two-thirds of your cheapest AMC quote, sign the contract. If it sits well below, stay ad-hoc and revisit.
Ask any provider for a trial quarter before a twelve-month term. The ones who refuse are telling you something.
FAQ
How many IT incidents per month is too many for ad-hoc support? More than two a month at any office size. That is roughly where annual AMC fees fall below annual incident spend. The threshold drops to about one a month if your incidents involve parts rather than software.
Is ad-hoc IT support cheaper in the short term? Yes, in any month with no problems. But model the tail, not the average: one server or storage failure can exceed a full year of AMC fees.
How do I know my actual incident cost? Log it. Track technician hours, parts spend and your own coordination time for eight weeks. Blended cost per incident is the number that makes the comparison honest, and most owners underestimate it by a third.
What if my staff can handle simple issues themselves? Good, keep that arrangement and count only what reaches a vendor. A hybrid works well: AMC for the server, network and shared storage, per-incident for single-user hardware. Remote IT support resolves most single-user issues in minutes without a visit.
Can I mix ad-hoc and managed support? Most providers will. Contract the server, network and printers, and keep on-site IT support for individual laptops on a per-incident basis. That cuts the fixed cost while covering the failures that actually stop work.
Compare the Options for Your Office
24Bit System offers both contract and per-incident support across Noida and Delhi NCR, so you can start ad-hoc and convert once the numbers justify it. To have someone run the eight-week log with you, call +91 7840002466.
