- The fully-loaded cost of one mid-level IT engineer in the Netherlands runs €65,000–90,000 per year, including employer contributions and benefits
- MSP pricing for a 50-person business typically runs €25,000–45,000 per year, including tooling that would cost extra on top of in-house salary
- A single in-house hire creates a single point of failure: no coverage during leave, illness, or after resignation
- The hybrid model (IT manager in-house plus MSP for day-to-day support) works well for businesses of 80–250 staff
- When evaluating MSPs, SLA detail, references from similar businesses, and exit terms matter more than headline price
The real cost of in-house IT
A mid-level IT support engineer in the Netherlands earns €42,000–58,000 in base salary. Add employer pension contributions (roughly 15%), employer health insurance contributions, 25 days of paid leave, and equipment budget, and the total employment cost reaches €65,000–90,000 per year. A senior engineer or IT manager runs higher.
Salary is only part of the picture. A single IT person creates three structural problems that salary calculations miss.
Single point of failure. Your IT function stops when that person takes leave, falls ill, or resigns. The average IT role takes three to four months to fill. In the interim, your support backlog grows and incident response capability drops to zero.
Breadth gaps. A competent generalist can handle help desk tickets, basic network issues, and Microsoft 365 administration. They cannot hold deep expertise in security monitoring, cloud architecture, compliance auditing, and infrastructure management simultaneously. As businesses grow, those specialisations matter more.
Coverage hours. Standard employment covers 40 hours per week. IT problems do not respect office hours. An after-hours incident without on-call coverage becomes a morning problem that could have been contained at 10pm.
Take the base salary and multiply by 1.35 to account for employer contributions, holiday, and sick leave. Add €2,000–4,000 for training. Add equipment costs. Add the value of coverage gaps. Most businesses find the real cost runs 40–50% above the headline salary figure.
What an MSP actually costs
MSPs price in three common models: per user, per device, or a flat monthly fee. Per-user pricing is most common and typically runs €30–70 per user per month in the Netherlands and UK, depending on scope.
For a 50-person business at €45/user/month, that is €2,250 per month, or €27,000 per year. A fully managed service at the high end of the market might run €40,000–45,000 per year for 50 users.
A standard managed service contract includes help desk support, patch management, device monitoring, endpoint security tooling, backup oversight, and Microsoft 365 administration. Project work, on-site visits beyond a defined threshold, and specialist engagements are typically charged separately.
The comparison with in-house should account for tooling costs an MSP bundles into their fee. Endpoint protection, remote monitoring and management (RMM) software, and backup services, when bought separately, add €5,000–12,000 per year for a 50-person business on top of the IT staffing cost.
Five things to compare directly
When in-house makes sense
In-house IT becomes the right choice when your organisation has more than 150 staff with complex, heterogeneous systems across multiple sites. Scale justifies the investment and reduces the single-point-of-failure risk, because a team of three or four people can cover each other.
Regulated environments can also push toward in-house. Financial services firms, healthcare providers, and businesses handling critical infrastructure may face regulatory expectations for dedicated in-house technical competence that an MSP relationship does not satisfy.
If your business runs proprietary or legacy systems requiring specialist institutional knowledge that no external provider will develop, in-house remains the more reliable path. The same applies where you need a full-time physical presence: on-site manufacturing IT, for example, where remote management has clear limits.
When an MSP makes sense
An MSP typically delivers better value when your business has fewer than 100 staff with generalist IT needs: Microsoft 365, standard laptops, VPN access, and cloud storage. Breadth and predictability matter more than depth at this scale.
Distributed and remote teams are strong MSP candidates. If your staff work across multiple locations or from home, the value of on-site presence drops and remote management tools become the primary support channel anyway.
Businesses that have experienced repeated coverage gaps, helpdesk backlogs, or key-person dependency from relying on one or two in-house people are well-positioned to benefit from the structured coverage an MSP provides. The same is true when predictable monthly costs matter for budgeting, or when after-hours monitoring is a requirement that cannot be staffed for economically in-house.
The hybrid model
The hybrid model places a senior IT person in-house, typically an IT manager or IT lead, while outsourcing day-to-day support to an MSP. The in-house person owns the vendor relationship, handles procurement and strategic decisions, manages the MSP contract, and maintains institutional knowledge. The MSP handles tickets, monitoring, patching, and first-line response.
This model works well for businesses of 80–250 staff. It combines business-contextual IT leadership with MSP-level operational coverage without the full cost of an in-house team.
The risk: if the IT manager and MSP have unclear role boundaries, friction develops. Define explicitly who is responsible for what. Security policy sits with the IT manager, alert response sits with the MSP, procurement decisions go to the IT manager with MSP input, user onboarding is split between them with a documented checklist.
How to evaluate an MSP
Price is rarely the deciding factor when choosing an MSP. These questions separate good providers from bad ones.
References from similar businesses. Ask for two or three references from businesses of comparable size and sector. Call them and ask specifically how the MSP communicated during incidents, not just whether they resolved them.
SLA detail. Read the SLA in full. What is the guaranteed response time for a P1 incident? What credit do you receive if they miss it? What is excluded from the SLA?
Security credentials. ISO 27001 certification for the MSP itself is a meaningful signal. It means their own systems and processes meet a documented standard.
Exit terms. Switching MSPs is painful. What is the notice period? What documentation and knowledge transfer are contractually required? Who holds the service configurations?
After-hours incident handling. Ask how they handle a major incident at 2am on a Sunday. The answer, and how confidently they give it, tells you more than the contract does.
The question is not whether an MSP is better than in-house IT. It is whether your business needs an IT team or an IT function.