There is a base retainer of £95 a month, which covers having us at all: your network documented, your contacts on the incident rota, and a named engineer who already knows your setup when you ring. On top of that, monitored devices are £14 each and covered people are £4 each — the split matters, because the two are genuinely different work. A device generates alerts that need triaging; a person generates a mailbox that needs watching and a human being who might click something. A business with sixty devices and eight staff is a different job from one with eight devices and sixty staff, and pricing everything per seat would get one of them badly wrong. Modules are added on the same basis: detection and response at £9 a device, backup assurance at £6, phishing simulation and training at £3.50 per person per month, and Cyber Essentials folded in at £121 a month rather than £1,450 in one go. Everything is thirty days rolling, and if you want to drop a module you email Rowan and it stops at the end of the month.

Hardware. We do not resell it, we take no commission on it, and if you need a firewall we will tell you which one and let you buy it wherever you like — usually several hundred pounds cheaper than we could sell it to you for. The same goes for licences: Microsoft 365 Business Premium is the right answer for most of our clients and you should buy it directly. There is also no call-out fee, no out-of-hours premium for retained clients, no annual “review” invoice, and no charge for the readiness work when a certification renewal comes round while you are with us. Consultancy outside the schedule is £110 an hour charged in half hours, and we will always tell you before an hour starts rather than after it has finished. If we quote you a project figure and the job turns out smaller than expected, you get the smaller number — that has happened eleven times in the last three years, and it is why the same clients keep coming back.