The 100-person clinic problem
Imagine a clinic with 100 staff. Forty employees use dedicated computers throughout the day. Sixty nurses, assistants or practitioners mainly use shared clinical stations or check email occasionally. Pricing all 100 people as full IT users can materially overstate the actual support footprint.
But device-only pricing is not enough either
Those 60 light users still have identities, mailbox access, password resets, onboarding/offboarding and security exposure. A shared reception workstation may serve several people but still needs patching, endpoint protection and support.
Split the environment into measurable components
A more accurate model counts full technology users, light/email-only users, shared and dedicated endpoints, servers, firewalls/switches/access points, backup data, business sites, security scope and support coverage.
Price the clinical dependencies too
Line-of-business applications, imaging, phones, internet, printers and third-party vendors may not be directly managed by the MSP, but someone still needs to coordinate troubleshooting and changes across them.
Security scope can change the monthly number
A clinic requiring stronger endpoint detection, centralized logging, vulnerability management, security awareness and more formal evidence will naturally cost more to operate than one using a basic support-only stack.
Use a calculator as a planning tool
An online estimator should help establish a budget range. A final quote still needs discovery because the same counts can hide very different application, security, network and support complexity.