Four users.
£99 a month.
Replaced for £1,487. Once..
A UK professional practice with four users was paying £99 a month for a managed firewall on a contract that auto-renewed. The hardware was fine. The bill was the problem. One UniFi build, purchased outright, and the monthly cost stopped.
Relevant if: you’re a small practice paying monthly for something you could own outright.
Diagram showing the replacement of a £99/month managed firewall contract with a £1,487 one-time UniFi build, eliminating recurring fees for a UK professional practice and saving £4,453 over five years.
Four people.
One pointless bill.
“A 4-person office. £99 a month. On a contract that renewed automatically, for a box they’d never touched.”
The practice was paying £99/month for a managed firewall. Not because the service was particularly good, and not because they’d recently decided it was the right tool. The contract had been set up years earlier and kept renewing. Nobody had reviewed it because £99 a month doesn’t feel urgent. It’s not a big line on the P&L. It just sits there.
For a four-user office, a managed firewall contract is rarely necessary. The service model assumes you don’t want to think about networking at all, so you pay someone to hold the box on your behalf indefinitely. The alternative: buy the hardware, configure it once, and own it. The managed contract provides ongoing billing for ongoing access to something that doesn’t need to be ongoing.
Over five years, £99/month is £5,940. The practice had no hardware to show for it and no exit without cancelling the contract.
Replace the monthly
with a one-time.
The triage identified the overspend within the first conversation. The managed firewall contract was providing basic routing and security: the kind of thing a modern UniFi gateway handles natively, out of the box, without an ongoing service wrapper. For a four-user practice, that’s the entire requirement.
The spec was straightforward: a UniFi gateway and a managed PoE switch, purchased outright. No subscription, no managed service, no dependency on a third party to keep the lights on. The hardware is configurable, reliable, and supported by a proper management interface if anything ever needs adjusting. For a four-person office, it will likely run untouched for years.
The hardware was sourced, configured off-site, and deployed in a single day. The old contract was terminated. The total cost: £1,487 once.
UniFi gateway and
managed PoE switch
UniFi gateway and managed PoE switch, configured and deployed on-site in a single day. Hardware purchased outright, owned by the practice, requiring no ongoing contract. Full network reconfiguration, old contract terminated on completion.
- Hardware purchased outright
- Full network reconfiguration
- On-site deployment (1 day)
- Old contract terminated
Small recurring fees
survive precisely
because they’re small.
The monthly cost was small enough that it never felt urgent. £99/month doesn’t trigger a review. It’s below the threshold where someone books a meeting to talk about it. It just renews. Year after year, quietly, because nobody has looked at it recently enough to ask whether it still makes sense.
Over 5 years, that’s £5,940 for a service that a £1,487 one-time purchase replaces entirely. The maths aren’t complicated. The problem is that nobody ran them. Small recurring fees survive precisely because they’re small. They stay under the line where scrutiny kicks in, and they compound quietly in the background while the bigger costs get all the attention.
The audit catches them because it maps the full picture, not just the things that feel expensive. This kind of finding shows up in almost every engagement. The size of the practice doesn’t change the pattern. Only the total varies.
Questions raised.
- Do I need enterprise-grade hardware for a 4-person office?
- Yes, sort of. UniFi is enterprise-grade hardware at small-business prices. The point isn’t overkill; it’s that the hardware is reliable, configurable, and you own it outright. You stop paying a third party to manage a box you could manage yourself, or just leave running without touching it.
- What if the hardware breaks?
- You buy a replacement. A UniFi gateway costs less than three months of the managed contract it replaced here. There’s no ongoing dependency on a third party to swap a box. You order one, plug it in, restore the config. That’s it.
- Is this relevant if I have more than four users?
- Yes. The principle scales. The monthly cost per user decreases but the total spend increases. A 20-person office paying £300/month for managed networking is spending £18,000 over 5 years. The one-time build cost rarely exceeds a year’s worth of the contract it replaces.
- How do I know if my monthly IT contract is doing this to me?
- The triage finds it. Recurring IT costs are exactly what the 15-minute call maps: what you’re paying, what you’re getting, and whether the ratio makes sense. Most small practices have at least one monthly cost that fails that test.
Got a similar setup?
Let’s talk.
If your practice has monthly costs that have been renewing quietly for years, the 15-minute triage is the right place to start. Free, no pitch, honest answer on what an audit would actually find.