The question usually arrives the week after something breaks. The person in accounts who is good with computers could not fix it, and now somebody has to decide: do we hire an IT person, or do we pay a provider?
Read this knowing which side of the table we sit on: CloudSpinx sells managed IT in Kenya. Then check our arithmetic, because most of it is statutory and you can verify it against the KRA and NSSF notices yourself.
Some businesses should hire. We say which ones below.
What you actually need from IT
Before comparing costs, define the work. A Kenyan business that has outgrown the accounts person needs someone to cover:
- Day-to-day support: password resets, printers, email, "my laptop is slow"
- Infrastructure: servers, network, Wi-Fi, the internet link, cloud services
- Security: firewall, endpoint protection, backups, access control, patching
- Software: installing, updating and fixing business applications
- Planning: what to buy next, what to budget, which vendor to fight with
- Compliance: the Data Protection Act, KRA eTIMS, anything your sector adds
One person can do all of this for a small business. They cannot do all of it well, and they cannot do it at 2am on a Sunday.
What an IT hire costs on top of the salary
Use your own salary figure, because only you know what you are offering. What sits on top of it is set by law, and it is smaller than people fear and larger than the job advert admits.
Take KES 120,000 a month as an example. From February 2026 the employer pays 6% of pensionable pay to NSSF up to an upper limit of KES 108,000, which is a maximum of KES 6,480 a month under the NSSF Year 4 rates. The employer also matches the Affordable Housing Levy at 1.5% of gross, another KES 1,800. That is KES 8,280 a month, or 6.9% on top, before anything optional.
SHIF does not belong in that sum. It comes out of the employee's pay.
Then come the costs that are not statutory and are never zero: medical cover, a laptop, the tools an IT person needs to do the job (monitoring, remote access, a ticket queue), training, the recruiter's fee, and paid leave during which someone else has to cover. Put your real numbers against each. They are yours to price, and a provider who quotes them to you without asking is guessing.
What one hire cannot give you at any salary
Nights and weekends. One person works one working week, and there are 168 hours in every week. If your system goes down at 11pm on a Friday, either nobody responds until Monday or your one IT person answers from bed on WhatsApp, tired, which is how small outages become large ones.
Leave and resignation. When they are on leave, sick or gone, your IT has no cover at all.
Breadth. Nobody is expert in networking, security, cloud, databases and desktop support at once. Your hire will be strong in two or three of those and learning the rest on your systems. A Windows Server specialist is the wrong person for your move to AWS, and you will not know that until the move is half done.
A second pair of eyes. Nobody reviews a solo hire's work, so the backup job that has never been restored, the "temporary" firewall rule and the root password in a text file on the desktop all survive until the day they matter. None of that needs a bad hire. It only needs one person and no reviewer.
What managed IT costs in Kenya
Managed IT is not a tier off a menu, and a provider quoting a fixed price before seeing your estate is guessing. Ours starts at around KES 15,000 a month for a small office on business-hours cover. A business of about thirty people with cloud infrastructure and a monthly security review typically lands nearer KES 35,000. Moving from business hours to round-the-clock on-call is close to a doubling, because it is the difference between a rota and a roster. The figure is quoted once, in writing, and holds for the term. The full model is in how we scope and price an engagement.
Side by side, for the same estate:
| One in-house hire | Managed IT | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | Your salary figure, plus 6.9% statutory at KES 120,000, plus equipment, tools, cover and recruitment | From around KES 15,000 on business hours, typically nearer KES 35,000 for thirty people with cloud and a security review |
| Hours covered | One working week | Business hours, or all 168 with on-call |
| Leave and resignation | No cover | Someone else on the account |
| Expertise | Two or three areas, deep | A team, each deep in their own |
| Documentation | Whatever the person wrote down | Written as part of the service and handed to you |
Put your own salary offer in the first column.
For most businesses whose product is not technology, the second column wins on cost and on cover, and it wins on cover even where the costs come out close, because the first column has nobody on it at night, nobody on it in August when your hire takes leave, and nobody on it the month after they resign. Where the second column loses, it loses clearly, and the next section says when.
When hiring in-house is the right call
Your support volume fills a full-time job. Once there is a day's worth of tickets every day, a dedicated person earns their salary, and someone in the building fixes hardware faster than anyone on the road.
Your business is technology. For a software company, a fintech or a SaaS platform, the infrastructure is the product. You need engineers inside the team, not a contract.
Your regulator or contract says so. Some banking and health roles require IT staff on your own payroll with specific clearances. That settles it.
Hardware needs hands every day. Point-of-sale terminals, industrial equipment and lab kit need a person on site daily.
You are building capability on purpose. Some businesses invest in internal IT as a strategy, and that is a valid choice if you have the budget and the patience. Our IT consulting work helps internal teams build the skills.
When managed wins
When IT supports the business rather than being it: a logistics firm, a retail chain, a law practice, a manufacturer. You need it to work, and you need it to keep working when the one person who understood it leaves.
That departure is the real trigger for most switches. People leave for better pay or for remote roles paid in dollars, and they take with them the passwords nobody wrote down, the reason a system is configured the way it is, the relationships with your vendors and whatever project was half done. The replacement then spends their first months finding out how things work, and sometimes changes what they do not understand. A provider absorbs that: if an engineer on your account leaves, another picks it up from the documentation, which is yours from the first week.
The hybrid most established teams end up with
Keep one person in the building for users, laptops and printers, and let a managed provider carry the infrastructure, security, backups and on-call behind them. If you already employ good engineers, this co-managed shape is the one we recommend most often: your team keeps the floor and the knowledge, we carry escalation, the deep platform work and the nights. It costs less than either a full outsource or another senior hire.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does a managed IT service cost in Kenya? From around KES 15,000 a month for a small office on business-hours cover, and typically nearer KES 35,000 for a thirty-person business with cloud infrastructure and a monthly security review. Round-the-clock on-call is close to double. You get one monthly figure agreed in writing before you sign, and it holds for the term.
Is it cheaper to outsource IT or hire in Kenya? For most businesses whose product is not technology, yes. Compare one salary plus its statutory add-on (KES 8,280 a month at a KES 120,000 salary, from NSSF and the housing levy), equipment and cover, against a managed contract that buys a team instead of one person.
Can I use both in-house IT and managed services? Yes. An in-house person handles daily user support and a managed provider carries infrastructure, security and on-call behind them. That is the co-managed model above.
What happens to my data if I switch managed IT providers? It was never the provider's. Credentials live in your password manager from the first week, and documentation, diagrams and license records are yours as they are written. If you leave, you leave with a working, documented estate.
Choosing the provider
If managed is the right model, the evaluation is a separate job and it is not done by reading proposals. Ask the shortlist to show you five things in the first meeting: the live monitoring console, the last patch report they sent anyone, the last restore test and how long it took, what their inventory says about a lost laptop, and their ODPC registration number. Then read the exit terms before the price.
Start with us if you like. Book a free consultation or WhatsApp +254 713 403 044, and we will put both columns of that table in front of you with your numbers in them, even when the answer is "hire". Our managed IT services page sets out what is in scope and how we price it.
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