Renewal season is when most multi-location businesses discover their IT pricing model was never really built for them.

The invoice creeps up every quarter, nobody can explain exactly why, and finance starts asking questions IT can’t answer without pulling out a spreadsheet. Picture a twelve-location retail chain that signed a per-user contract when it had two offices and forty employees. Three years and eight store openings later, the same contract is now covering self-checkout kiosks, back-office scanners, and shared inventory tablets that no single “user” owns, and the bill has nearly tripled without headcount growing much at all. Usually, the root cause isn’t the provider. It’s the pricing model.

Managed IT services are typically sold one of two ways: per-user or per-device. Both are simple to explain in a sales pitch. Neither is simple once you’re running IT across five, ten, or fifty locations with a mix of shared printers, conference room systems, warehouse scanners, and remote employees. Picking the wrong one doesn’t just cost more; it makes your IT spend impossible to forecast.

What per-user pricing actually means

Per-user pricing charges a flat monthly rate for each employee, and that rate is meant to cover all the devices and support that person needs. It’s one of the more common models heading into 2026, and it’s easy to see why: one number per head, scales cleanly as you hire, easy to budget a year out. According to Clutch’s IT services pricing guide, small and mid-sized businesses typically see per-user rates land somewhere between $75 and $250 a month depending on the scope of coverage and how much security is bundled in.

The catch is that “per user” assumes every user looks roughly the same. A remote employee with one laptop and a receptionist juggling a desktop, a VoIP phone, a badge reader, and a shared printer get billed identically, even though one of them generates far more support tickets than the other. The modern employee doesn’t help matters either. Industry BYOD research puts the average worker at around 2.5 connected devices for work, spanning laptops, phones, and tablets, which means the “per user” number is really shorthand for two and a half devices’ worth of support, whether the provider accounts for that or not. In an office full of power users with multiple devices, that mismatch adds up, and it’s the kind of thing that quietly erodes a good deal into a mediocre one.

What per-device pricing actually means

Per-device pricing flips the math: you pay per laptop, desktop, server, or piece of network equipment being managed, typically somewhere between $30 and $200 per device per month depending on the device type and service level. This model shines in environments with shared or rotating equipment, think retail counters, warehouse scanners, manufacturing floor terminals, or healthcare workstations that multiple staff log into across a shift. You’re paying for what’s actually being supported, not guessing based on headcount.

The tradeoff is that device counts move constantly. Every new laptop, replaced router, or retired server changes the bill, which makes budgeting harder and creates a strange incentive to hang onto aging hardware just to avoid triggering a new line item. Add in phones, tablets, and the network gear, switches, access points, sensors, that a growing footprint requires, and the device count can balloon well past what anyone budgeted for. A business managing its own network infrastructure across several sites in particular tends to underestimate this category until the invoice shows up.

Why multi-site firms feel it more than anyone

A single-office company can usually get away with either model, since the mismatch between users and devices stays small and easy to eyeball. Multi-site firms don’t get that luxury. Every location adds its own mix of conference room displays, shared front-desk computers, network switches, badge readers, and printers that don’t belong to any one employee. None of that fits neatly into a per-user count, and all of it adds up fast under a per-device count.

Walk through a typical three-location company and the mismatch becomes obvious. Headquarters is full of knowledge workers with a laptop and a phone each, a textbook fit for per-user pricing. The warehouse location has six employees but forty pieces of equipment: scanners, label printers, forklift-mounted tablets, and network sensors, which per-user pricing would badly undercharge and per-device pricing would price fairly. The small satellite sales office has three people working almost entirely off personal devices under a BYOD policy, which complicates both models depending on whether personal hardware counts toward the total. Multi-site firms routinely have all three of these situations happening under one contract, which is exactly how a “simple” pricing model turns into an invoice nobody can reconcile.

The traps that show up at scale

A few patterns tend to catch multi-site firms off guard once a contract is a year or two old.

Shared and rotating devices, common in retail, manufacturing, and healthcare settings, get undercounted or miscategorized under per-user pricing, leaving gaps in what’s actually being supported and, eventually, gaps in what’s actually working.

Headcount fluctuation, seasonal staff, contractors, and remote hires who come and go, makes per-user costs harder to forecast than the pitch deck suggested, especially for firms with a seasonal retail or hospitality footprint where staffing can swing 30 percent or more between quarters.

Device sprawl, driven by BYOD policies, IoT sensors, and cloud-only endpoints, makes per-device totals climb in ways that have nothing to do with business growth. With BYOD adoption now standard practice at most organizations, this isn’t a fringe issue, it’s the default state of most networks.

And new or temporary locations, pop-up stores, project offices, event spaces, rarely fit the existing contract structure at all, which means they either get bolted on at a premium rate or left unmanaged until something breaks.

None of these are dealbreakers for either model. They’re just the reason a pricing structure that worked fine for one office can quietly stop working once you’re managing five.

How to actually decide

The honest answer is that the right model depends on your device-to-user ratio at each location, not company-wide. A services-heavy office full of knowledge workers with one laptop apiece is a good fit for per-user pricing. A location with shared terminals, network hardware, and A/V equipment is usually cheaper and more predictable under per-device pricing, or under a hybrid structure that blends both. Some providers now offer exactly that: per-user as the baseline, with per-device add-ons for locations with heavier equipment loads. Before signing anything, it’s worth mapping device counts against headcount at every site, not just the one where the sales call happened, and asking a prospective provider how they’d price your specific mix rather than accepting a single company-wide rate.

A third option: pay for what you use

There’s a model that sidesteps this whole calculation, and it’s worth putting on the table before locking into either subscription structure: paying only for the support you actually use, when and where you use it. Instead of a recurring per-user or per-device fee across every location regardless of ticket volume, you schedule a technician for the work that needs doing, whether that’s a desktop swap, a network setup, or an A/V install, and pay for that engagement.

This is the model Techmate runs on. Rather than trying to force every office into one pricing bucket, you get on-site, on-demand IT support at any location, in the US, Canada, or UK, without a subscription tied to your headcount or your device count. For firms with locations that don’t fit neatly into per-user or per-device math, whether that’s the warehouse with forty devices and six employees or the pop-up store that only exists for a season, that flexibility often works out cheaper than either. You can see how the booking process works on our how it works page, or browse the full range of on-site services, including network setup and support, on our services page. We also cover how to weigh outsourcing against staff augmentation and co-managed IT, another pricing and structure decision multi-site firms run into, in this guide, and how in-house, outsourced, and hybrid field IT operations stack up in our field operations guide.

If your current invoice doesn’t match the way your locations actually operate, it’s worth a conversation before the next renewal. Reach out to Techmate and we’ll help you figure out which pricing structure, or which mix, actually fits your footprint.