A company of a dozen people loses half a team the moment one PC dies. The printer will not connect, WhatsApp stops delivering customer messages, the cloud drive is full again. None of this is hard, yet two or three land every week, and they usually end up with the boss or the most tech-minded colleague fixing them "on the side". The trouble is that as the company grows, IT problems move from occasional to daily, while the person handling them has a day job.
Which brings the question: should you hire an IT person, or outsource support to an IT services company? Both routes are common, but the choice is not simply about which looks cheaper. Below is a practical breakdown of cost, risk and where the line sits, using realistic Hong Kong SME numbers.
Hiring in-house: the cost beyond the salary
At 2026 Hong Kong market levels, an IT support person with two or three years of experience earns roughly HK$18,000 to HK$28,000 a month, depending on whether they know networking, servers and cloud. The employer's real spend goes further: 5% MPF, paid leave, public holidays, medical insurance and a year-end bonus usually add up to 1.15 to 1.2 times the monthly figure. A HK$22,000 salary therefore costs about HK$300,000 to HK$320,000 a year.
Two hidden costs follow. The first is hiring time: two to three months between advertising the role and someone starting is normal, and the problems keep arriving meanwhile. The second is single-person risk: when that colleague takes leave, falls ill or resigns, every account, password and setting walks out with them. Unless documentation and handover were done properly, every staff change feels like rebooting the company.
The advantages are real: someone on site immediately, someone who knows the people and the legacy systems, someone who can also teach a colleague a new tool. Where the business runs on one critical system, that on-the-spot responsiveness is very hard to outsource.
Outsourcing: three pricing models
- Per incident: HK$400 to HK$900 per onsite or remote session with no contract. Suits companies with few problems that dislike fixed costs.
- Per device or user, monthly: HK$150 to HK$400 per machine or person per month, including a set number of sessions and basic monitoring. Suits firms of 20 to 50 with a file server or cloud collaboration.
- Fully managed: network, servers, backup, antivirus and account management in one package, quoted monthly or annually. Suits companies that do not want IT headcount but need a dependable service commitment.
The biggest benefit is having a team: cover during leave, documented procedures, monitoring tools, and a backup and restore trail. The limits deserve equal honesty. Support staff are not sitting in your office, so anything needing an immediate judgement call â a halted production line, a clinic with a queue at the door â moves half a beat slower. And if internal history was never written down, every outsourced engineer has to rediscover it.
Five scenarios, five answers
- 10 to 15 people, fewer than 10 issues a month: per-incident outsourcing wins. Most months bring two or three cases, and the annual bill may stay under HK$10,000.
- 20 to 40 people with cloud storage and shared printing: monthly per-device cover, roughly HK$5,000 to HK$9,000 a month, including account setup and offboarding handovers.
- 50-plus people, or a system you built yourselves: one internal IT person as the interface, with outsourcing for deep technical work and holiday cover â usually the most balanced arrangement.
- Multiple branches, restaurants, clinics, workshops: onsite response time decides it. Check whether the service commitment states how many hours until an engineer arrives, not just the monthly fee.
- The problem is actually repetitive admin work: merging reports, copying data, sending notices. That is a process automation problem, and no amount of headcount will fix it.
When you must hire in-house
Three situations: the core of the business runs on one system â POS, inventory, bookings, a website backend â where one hour down is one hour of lost sales; someone must be on site within 15 minutes, such as a restaurant at lunch or a clinic at opening; or there is sensitive data and a compliance requirement, such as patient records or financial ledgers.
A simple way to do the maths
Do not compare salary with monthly fee alone. Add the annual total, plus expected downtime hours multiplied by lost business per hour, plus the hidden cost of the boss and colleagues doing IT part-time. Take a 25-person company: in-house costs about HK$320,000 a year; outsourcing at HK$7,000 a month is HK$84,000, but each request may wait two to four hours. If an hour of downtime costs about HK$5,000 in business, a year with a few serious incidents narrows the gap quickly.
Six questions to ask before signing
- Is response time written down? How many hours to respond, how many to resolve, and are severity levels defined?
- When remote support cannot fix it, when will someone come on site, and is the visit charged?
- How is backup handled, and has a restore ever been tested? An untested backup is not a backup.
- Who owns hardware and software licensing? A large share of disputes start on this line.
- If the relationship ends, how are accounts, passwords and configuration documents handed over?
- Is there a monthly report? Ticket volume and top issue types are the only way to judge whether the money is well spent.
Summary
In-house versus outsourced is not a moral choice between two camps; it is a question of allocating core and non-core work. Core systems and anything needing an immediate physical presence deserve your own person. Standardised, remotely fixable work with clear procedures is usually steadier in an outsourced team's hands. The most practical answer is usually a hybrid: one internal colleague as the interface and first line, an outsourced partner for network, backup, security and holiday cover, and a written asset list with a handover document. Then a change of staff or vendor no longer wipes the company's memory.