The question “should I hire an IT technician or call a company?” is almost never settled by salary, even if that’s where everyone starts. It’s settled by what happens the day that person is on holiday, goes on long-term sick leave or leaves for a competitor. An in-house or outsourced IT technician are not two versions of the same thing, one cheaper and one dearer: they are two different risk models. And choosing wrong costs far more than the difference on the invoice.
Let’s put the numbers and the criteria on the table, no smoke and mirrors, so you can decide based on the real size of your company and not on what the business next door did.
The total cost of an in-house IT technician (beyond the salary)
The most common miscalculation is looking only at the gross annual figure. A competent systems technician doesn’t come in under 28,000–40,000 € gross per year, and on top of that figure you have to add everything that never shows up on the payslip but very much shows up in your accounts: the employer’s social security contributions (around 30 % more), the paid holiday you keep covering while no one fills their post, sick leave, and the ongoing training they need to avoid falling behind in a sector that changes every quarter.
Once you add it all up, the real cost of an in-house hire easily approaches 45,000–55,000 € a year. And that money buys you a single person, with a single profile and a single brain.
That’s the underlying problem, and it isn’t financial but structural: an in-house IT technician is a single point of failure. They know networks, but they’re not a cybersecurity specialist. They get by with the server, but they’ve never designed a cloud architecture. And the day they fall ill or leave, all the knowledge of your infrastructure goes with them: the passwords, the reasons behind each setting, the mental map of how your system is built. Rebuilding that from scratch is expensive and slow.
- Gross salary plus 30 % in employer contributions on your side.
- Holidays, sick leave and time off: zero cover while they’re away.
- Ongoing training and certifications to keep from falling behind.
- A single profile: no one is an expert in everything at once.
- Total dependency: if they leave, the knowledge leaves with them.
What an outsourced company gives you: 24/7, L1–L2–L3 and backup
An IT support company doesn’t sell you a person: it sells you a team. And that makes all the difference. When you outsource, you stop depending on an individual and start leaning on a structure designed precisely so that no single failure brings your operation down.
The first change is 24/7 coverage. Problems don’t wait for office hours: ransomware gets in on a Sunday night, a server goes down in August. An in-house hire sleeps; a support team has on-call rotas and continuous monitoring that detects and acts before you even find out.
The second is the tiered structure. L1 support handles the everyday (users, quick incidents), L2 steps into configurations and systems, and L3 is the specialist who shows up when the problem is serious or calls for architecture. With an in-house hire, the same person does everything, whether it’s their specialty or not. With a team, each incident is handled by someone who knows how.
- No single point of failure: holidays and sick leave are no longer your problem.
- Access to several specialists (cloud, cybersecurity, networks, compliance) for the price of one.
- Monitoring and backups that keep working even while you sleep.
- Processes, documentation and SLAs: the knowledge stays, it doesn’t walk out the door.
You can see the full scope on our services page: cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, ISO 27001, managed workplace and tiered support, all under a single contract.
When each option pays off according to your company’s size
There’s no one-size-fits-all answer, and anyone who gives you one without asking about your size is selling, not advising. The real criterion depends on the volume of your operation and on how much it hurts when something grinds to a halt.
Up to 20–25 employees
Here an in-house hire rarely makes sense: there isn’t enough workload to keep them busy full-time and, when something serious comes up, they fall short on specialty. Outsourcing almost always wins: you pay for what you use and you have a full team behind you.
Between 25 and 100 employees
This is the decision zone. There may be enough work for one in-house person, but you still have the problem of coverage and specialization. This is where the hybrid model is usually the winner, and we’ll get to it now.
More than 100 employees
The volume justifies having in-house staff, but no one at this size runs everything with their own team. You combine an in-house team for the day-to-day with an external partner that brings 24/7 cover, specialists on demand, backup during peaks and regulatory compliance.
The hybrid model: in-house + outsourced
The false dichotomy is thinking you have to pick one or the other. In practice, the companies that handle their IT best combine the two. Your in-house person knows the business, is in the office and solves the immediate stuff; the outsourced company brings the technical depth, the out-of-hours coverage and the backup for when the in-house hire can’t keep up or isn’t around.
The hybrid model isn’t having an in-house hire “and also” paying a company: it’s about no longer piling onto one person responsibilities that no single person can cover.
The natural split is simple: the in-house hire takes care of the everyday and of direct contact with users; the outsourced company takes on 24/7 monitoring, cybersecurity, backups, cloud architecture and regulatory compliance. That way the in-house hire stops being a bottleneck and becomes a liaison, backed by a team that doesn’t fall ill or go on holiday all at once.
This formula is exactly what we propose when a company tackles outsourcing the IT department: we don’t replace your people, we add capacity where you lack it and remove risk where you have too much of it.
Questions to help you decide without getting it wrong
Before you sign anything, answer these questions honestly. If you hesitate on several of them, outsourcing or the hybrid model is your path.
- If your technician leaves tomorrow, does anyone else know how your system is set up?
- What happens if something critical goes down on a Saturday at 10 p.m.?
- Do you have cybersecurity and compliance covered (ISO 27001, GDPR), or are you lurching from scare to scare?
- Does your technician have real work for a full day, or are you paying them to be available?
- When a big project comes up (migration, cloud, major incident), can they handle it alone?
- Who restores your data if ransomware hits tomorrow and you last tested the backup… never?
The honest answer to these six questions is usually worth more than any spreadsheet comparing salaries. Because you’re not choosing an expense: you’re choosing how much operational risk you want to take on.
How MagicBoxDesk solves it
At MagicBoxDesk we outsource the IT department of SMEs and large companies across Spain, with remote and on-site support. We give you what an in-house hire can’t give you alone: a team with L1·L2·L3 support, 24/7 monitoring, cybersecurity, backups, cloud infrastructure and ISO 27001 compliance, at a predictable cost and without the burdens of hiring. And if you already have in-house staff, we don’t replace them: we reinforce them with the hybrid model so they stop being your single point of failure.
The first step isn’t to sell you an off-the-shelf plan, but to understand your size, your operation and your real risks so we can tell you what you genuinely need. Request a no-obligation quote and we’ll help you decide between in-house, outsourced or hybrid with real criteria, not smoke and mirrors.
