You're trying to build a budget, and you need a real number, not a range so wide it's useless. So let's start there.
For a 20-person charity in Greater Vancouver, fully managed IT support typically runs $1,500 to $3,000 a month, or roughly $75 to $150 per person. Where you land in that range depends on a handful of things we'll walk through below, but that's the honest starting point before anyone runs an assessment on your environment.
Pricing varies this much because what counts as "managed IT" isn't the same from one provider to the next, and the gap between a bare-bones plan and a genuinely comprehensive one is usually where the price difference comes from.
Why "Per Person" Instead of "Per User"
Most IT providers price by the user or the device. We price by the person, and it's not just semantics.
A charity's team rarely maps neatly onto a spreadsheet. You have full-time staff, part-time coordinators, a handful of volunteers who need email access, maybe a bookkeeper who logs in twice a month. Pricing per person means the plan is built around the people doing the work, not around counting logins. It also means your monthly cost stays predictable as your team shifts and grows, which for an organization living inside a fiscal year, is most of the point.
What $1,500 to $3,000 a Month Actually Covers
A number without context is just a number, so here's what fully managed IT is meant to include at that price point.
For a 20-person charity, that typically means unlimited help desk support, device monitoring and patching, full Microsoft 365 administration, core cybersecurity protection like endpoint detection and multi-factor authentication, and a level of strategic planning and budgeting help that most in-house setups don't have time for.
Two charities can pay the exact same monthly fee and receive very different levels of service. Some providers bundle all of this in. Others quote a lower base price and bill separately for pieces you'd assumed were part of the deal, new hardware, larger projects, a cloud migration, and those gaps rarely show up until the invoice does. It's worth asking a provider directly what's excluded from the monthly rate before you sign anything.
What Actually Moves the Number
Team size gets you into the right range, but it isn't the only thing setting your price. A few factors do most of the work.
If your systems are modern and standardized, a fairly recent version of Microsoft 365, a handful of laptop models, cloud-based file storage, your support needs are lighter than an environment held together with older servers and one-off fixes from whoever was available at the time. Your cybersecurity requirements matter too. A charity handling sensitive donor or client data will usually need more than baseline protection. Whether your team works from one office or several, remote or hybrid, adds a layer of coordination. And the state of your existing environment counts for a lot: a well-documented setup costs less to support than one with years of deferred maintenance sitting underneath it.
None of this is meant to make the number feel slippery. It's meant to explain why your neighbour's 20-person nonprofit might quote you a different figure than yours, without either of you being wrong.
What This Looked Like for One Vancouver Charity
It's easier to trust a number when you can see it play out somewhere real.
A 20-person charity in Greater Vancouver came to us after years of reactive, break-fix IT support. Nothing was catastrophically broken, but there was no real technology plan, budgeting was inconsistent year to year, and staff regularly waited too long for help when something did go wrong.
After moving to fully managed IT, their monthly cost became fixed and predictable, and it stayed that way even as the organization grew. In fact, that charity has since grown its team by nearly 50 percent. New hires now just get "a new computer," fully configured and ready on day one, and because pricing is per person, leadership can forecast the IT cost of every new hire before they extend the offer. That kind of predictability tends to matter more to a board than the monthly number itself.
Where the Discounts Come In
Before you assume this is out of reach, it's worth knowing that the $75 to $150 range isn't always the final number.
Many registered charities qualify for nonprofit technology pricing that lowers software licensing costs and, in some cases, the managed IT rate itself. For some eligible charities, fully managed support can start closer to $75 per person per month, depending on which programs your organization qualifies for. This is usually where charities find room in a budget they thought was already maxed out.
Building This Into Your Budget
You came here for a number to put in a spreadsheet, so here it is again, plainly: budget $1,500 to $3,000 a month for a 20-person team, and expect the actual figure to depend on your systems, your security needs, and whether you qualify for nonprofit pricing.
