MSSP Pricing 2026: What Managed Security Services Cost

Typical MSSP Pricing for US Businesses#

Those ranges are wide because the scope of the service varies so much. Three things move the price most:

• Who watches your systems at 3 a.m.
• Whether they fix problems or only report them
• How much log data they have to process

Below, we price a real 100-person company using published vendor rates. Each service level covers a bigger share of what an MSSP does day to day, and that's what the price reflects.

MSSP Price List for 2026#

Most MSSPs don't publish a managed security services price list, so we pulled one together from vendor rate cards and the pricing guides providers publish themselves. Treat it as a planning guide, not a quote.

Average Cost of an MSSP by Company Size#

The average cost of an MSSP is about $2,000 to $7,000 a month for a company with up to 100 employees and $7,000 to $25,000 a month for one with 100 to 1,000 employees. Headcount is still the best single predictor of the bill, and two publishers that track the US market, MSSPProviders.io and Meriplex, give planning ranges that mostly agree.

You'll also see a tighter version quoted, $2,000 to $5,000 a month for small businesses and $5,000 to $20,000 for mid-size ones. It comes from the same publisher's FAQ and sits inside the ranges above. Either way, treat these as directional estimates. Cyberuptive, for example, puts a 50-person company with 75 endpoints at roughly $4,000 to $15,000 a month for managed SOC coverage, which shows how much one size band can stretch.

Two companies with the same headcount can still land at opposite ends of a band. A 60-person accounting firm running laptops and Microsoft 365 is a very different job from a 60-person manufacturer with three plants, a dozen servers and machines on the factory floor network.

Why Two MSSP Quotes Can Differ by Ten Times#

MSSP quotes for the same company can differ by ten times because "managed security" covers at least four different services sold under one name. Once you know which one a quote describes, most of the pricing confusion goes away.

Here's what each level includes and costs:

• Managed tools (about $20 per user): endpoint, identity and SIEM tools with a vendor SOC watching alerts. Works if your own IT team can act on them.
• MDR ($8 to $30 per endpoint): a team that investigates and contains threats on your devices, with less attention on cloud, network and compliance.
• Full MSSP ($50 to $200 per user): 24/7 monitoring of everything, tool management and audit reports. It's what most companies without security staff need.
• MSSP plus managed IT ($100 to $350 per user, per VC3): security bundled with help desk and device management. It isn't a fair comparison if you already have an IT provider.

The easiest way to place a quote on this ladder is to ask who responds when an alert turns out to be real. If the answer is "we notify you," you're buying the bottom rung, whatever the proposal calls it.

Common Pricing Models for Managed Security Services#

MSSP pricing models decide how security services, monitoring and tools are billed, and most providers use one of six: per user, per device, tiered packages, usage-based, monitoring-only or per incident. The model matters as much as the rate, because it decides what makes your bill grow.

Per-User Pricing

Per-user pricing is the most common model for full MSSP services. You pay for each employee, and all their devices are covered, so your bill grows when you hire. It suits office-based companies where everyone has a laptop, a phone and a cloud identity. Before you compare, check how the provider counts contractors, service accounts and shared mailboxes, since they can quietly inflate the user count.

Per-Device or Per-Endpoint Pricing

Per-device pricing is typical for MDR and endpoint-focused services. It suits server-heavy or industrial sites with few staff. The MSSP Alert pricing benchmark puts the average at $45 per endpoint a month for basic services and $73 for premium ones. Ask for a rate per device type, because servers and firewalls usually cost a lot more than laptops.

Tiered or Bundled Pricing

Tiered packages, often sold as good, better and best, make buying easy but hide where the value is. Tiers usually differ in log retention and support hours. TrustNet's four tiers, for instance, range from 15 days of hot storage with 8/5 support up to 180 days of hot storage with 24/7 support, and the company quotes a starting price of $2,275 a month for a business with 25 IPs. Response and threat hunting are often saved for the top tier, so a cheaper tier may just be an alerting service.

Usage-Based Pricing

Usage-based pricing charges per gigabyte of log data ingested, per log source, or per event per second (EPS). It's common for SIEM-led services, and it's the model most likely to surprise you at renewal. Log volume grows every time you add a cloud app or a noisy firewall, even if headcount stays flat. Over a three-year contract, per-GB SIEM licensing costs can grow much faster than the business they protect.

Monitoring-Only and Per-Incident Pricing

Monitoring-only plans charge a lower flat rate to watch your systems and send alerts, while hands-on response is billed per incident, usually by the hour at roughly $150 to $400. That's cheaper in a quiet month and expensive in a bad one. If an attacker takes over an account and investigating it takes 40 hours, response adds $6,000 to $16,000 to that month's bill. Per-incident pricing rarely works as a main plan, but it's common as an add-on. A good test for any provider is to ask: if you see ransomware on one of our laptops at 2 a.m., what do you do in the first 15 minutes, and does it cost extra?

Whatever the model, co-managed and fully managed setups sit at different points in a provider's range. With co-managed, your team handles part of the work, often during business hours, and the provider covers nights and weekends. It's usually cheaper. Fully managed means the provider runs security end to end, and it's priced at the top of the range. Many providers also mix models, for example a per-user base rate with a log-volume allowance on top.

What Published Vendor Rates Tell Us About MSSP Prices#

A handful of security vendors publish their prices, and those rate cards are the closest thing the market has to a price floor. Most MSSPs don't publish theirs, which is why buyers have a hard time judging whether a quote is reasonable.

Now let's price a typical company with Huntress's published numbers. Say it has 100 employees, 150 endpoints across laptops and servers, 100 user identities and about 20 log sources.

That works out to about $19 per user, or roughly $22,900 a year. Huntress says deployment, integration and day-to-day management aren't included, and that detail matters more than the total.

Where the Rest of an MSSP's Fee Goes

A full MSSP serving the same company might quote $4,000 to $12,000 a month. That's two to six times the tool stack, and it's easy to assume the difference is profit. In our experience building platforms for providers, it mostly isn't.

The extra money pays for work a rate card leaves out:

• Onboarding and tuning: connecting your systems and tuning detection rules so analysts aren't buried in false alarms.
• Hands-on response: isolating a laptop, locking a compromised account and cleaning up afterwards.
• Tool management: patching and configuring firewalls, VPNs, email filters and vulnerability scanners.
• Compliance evidence: the reports auditors and cyber insurers ask for.
• A named contact: someone who knows your business and shows up to quarterly reviews.

What a Managed Security Contract Includes and What Costs Extra#

The monthly fee usually covers monitoring, alert triage, a standard set of log sources, monthly reports and a default log retention period, often somewhere between 90 days and a year. What it leaves out is just as predictable, and these extras are where real budgets go wrong.

Onboarding is the first one. Published figures range from nothing at all, since Huntress and Field Effect both say they charge no setup fee, to $0 to $5,000 or more in Cyberuptive's guide, and eSentire charges a $2,500 annual launch fee. Tool licenses may be passed through separately if they aren't bundled. Custom connectors for in-house or legacy apps, longer log retention and incident response beyond the first triage are often billed on top. Project work costs more again: Corsica Technologies puts virtual CISO retainers at $3,000 to $10,000 or more a month, penetration testing at $10,000 to $30,000 a year and compliance audit fees at $15,000 to $50,000.

Contract terms decide the rest. Before you sign, check these:

• Term length: 12 months is standard; 24 or 36 months, or paying a year upfront, often earns a 10% to 20% discount.
• Seat minimums: Huntress, for example, requires 50 seats per product for direct buyers.
• Billable units: a virtual machine, container host or shared mailbox can each count, so the same company might be 100 units to one provider and 300 to another.
• Incident response hours: how many are included, and what each extra hour costs.
• Renewal increases: whether there's a cap.
• Exit terms: whether you can take your logs, detection rules and reports with you.

Key Factors That Affect Managed Security Pricing#

Seven things set most of the price: unit count, coverage hours, response scope, who owns the technology, cloud footprint, log volume and retention, and compliance. Change any one and the quote moves.

• Unit count: servers, cloud workloads and network devices usually cost more than laptops.
• Coverage hours: real 24/7/365 staffing needs several analysts per seat, so it costs far more than 8/5 business hours with someone on call.
• Response scope: a provider that can isolate hosts and disable accounts on its own charges more, but stops threats much faster at night.
• Technology ownership: some providers bring their own agents and SIEM, which is simpler but ties you to them. Others build on tools you already license, such as Microsoft Defender or CrowdStrike, which lowers the fee but keeps those licenses on your bill. Buyers miss this one most often.
• Cloud footprint: every AWS, Azure or Google Cloud account, and every SaaS platform like Microsoft 365, Google Workspace or Salesforce, adds log sources to watch.
• Log volume and retention: more data kept for longer means more storage and processing, and providers pass that cost on.
• Compliance: covered in the next section.

How Compliance Requirements Show Up on the Bill

Compliance rarely adds a neat percentage to a quote. It adds specific work, and every piece of that work costs something. Huntress notes that healthcare and financial services firms commonly see 20% to 40% premiums for compliance-ready services.

If any of these apply to you, mention it in your first call with a provider. A quote that ignores compliance will look cheaper and then grow. Healthcare, finance and defense buyers usually see the most line items, because MSSPs that support US compliance frameworks have to price in retention, reporting and audit evidence from day one.

How to Calculate Your Own MSSP Cost#

To estimate your own MSSP cost, multiply your users or endpoints by a provider's rate, add one-time and add-on fees, then divide the total by your device count to find the effective rate. Here's how that looks for a 100-person company with 150 endpoints, no dedicated security staff and nobody on call overnight. That profile points to a full MSSP.

The MSSP pricing calculator below runs these numbers for your own company. Enter your users, endpoints and log sources, pick a service level, coverage model, industry and contract type, and it shows a monthly and annual range, your effective cost per user and per endpoint, and how all four service levels compare.

On top of the monthly fee, ask for onboarding as a separate one-time line, and price any extra retention, response hours or testing you know you'll need. Then divide the full monthly total by your device count. That effective per-device rate is the number to compare across providers, and it's often noticeably higher than the advertised base rate. Finally, rerun the numbers at the size you expect to be in a year, since headcount and log volume both tend to grow during a contract.

Comparing a Per-User Quote With a Per-Endpoint Quote

Providers quote in different units, which makes comparing them harder than it should be. The fix is one simple conversion: multiply the per-endpoint price by the number of endpoints per user. With 150 endpoints and 100 users, that's 1.5 endpoints per person, so a $45 per-endpoint quote is really $67.50 per user, and a $73 quote is $109.50. Now both sit on the same scale as a per-user offer. Before you convert, check what each provider counts as an endpoint. Servers, virtual machines and cloud workloads are where definitions differ most.

Is an MSSP Cheaper Than Building an In-House SOC?#

For most companies under about 1,000 employees, an MSSP is cheaper than an in-house SOC by a wide margin. It comes down to the math of round-the-clock staffing.

1. 8,760hours in a year that one 24/7 seat has to cover
2. ~1,800productive hours one full-time analyst works after leave and training
3. ≈ 5analysts needed to keep one seat staffed around the clock
4. $129,180median US information security analyst pay, May 2025 (BLS)
5. $645,900base pay for five analysts per year, before benefits, tools or a manager

A year has 8,760 hours. A full-time analyst puts in roughly 1,800 productive hours after leave, training and sick days, so staffing one seat around the clock takes about five people. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics put median pay for an information security analyst at $129,180 in May 2025. Five analysts at that rate cost $645,900 a year in base pay alone, before benefits, a manager, training or a single security tool. A full MSSP for a 100-person company typically costs $60,000 to $240,000 a year. At enterprise scale the gap gets bigger still: Cyberuptive estimates a fully staffed, enterprise-grade SOC at $2 million to $4 million a year once salaries, tooling and management are included.

Hiring is slow, too. The BLS expects jobs for these analysts to grow 21% between 2025 and 2035, much faster than average, so experienced people stay hard to find and harder to keep. Benefits, tools and turnover push the real cost well past salary.

An in-house team still makes sense once you're big enough to keep analysts busy, need deep knowledge of unusual internal systems, or face rules that demand tight control over where data lives. Plenty of mid-size companies split the difference with co-managed security, keeping one or two security people on staff and buying overnight coverage.

For MSSPs: The Cost Problem Behind These Prices#

Many MSSPs bill clients per user but pay their SIEM vendor per gigabyte of logs, so when a client adds a cloud app or a chatty firewall, the provider's costs rise while the invoice stays flat. That's a big reason prices climb at renewal. Providers protect their margin by adding a log-volume allowance to per-user pricing, filtering logs before they reach expensive analytics, and cutting MSSP infrastructure cost per client.

The longer-term fix is owning the platform instead of renting it, so a new client adds infrastructure cost rather than another license tier. WhyCrew's engineers build white-label SIEM and SOC platforms for MSSPs for a one-time, fixed price and hand over the source code, and an MSSP engineering partner can build that platform alongside your team. We don't sell managed security services to end clients, so the buyer advice in this article is provider-neutral.

How to Budget and Compare MSSP Quotes#

Start with the level of service you need, then hold every quote to that level. For most small and mid-size US companies, that's a full MSSP somewhere between $2,000 and $25,000 a month, depending on headcount, coverage hours and how much hands-on response you want included.

When you request quotes:

• Send every provider the same brief: users, endpoints by type, cloud accounts, log sources, compliance rules, coverage hours and whether you need active response.
• Ask for prices per user, with every exclusion priced separately.
• Compare three-year totals, not first-month fees.
• Get mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR) commitments in writing.
• Confirm the SOC is staffed 24/7 by the provider's own people.
• Ask who owns your logs if you leave.

Before you ask for quotes, spend ten minutes on three questions:

• Who on your team would handle a critical alert at 2 a.m. on a Sunday?
• Which regulators, insurers or customers expect proof of continuous monitoring?
• Which security tools are you already paying for, and are they actually set up?

Your answers place you on the price ladder above and make every proposal much easier to compare. If you're still deciding whether to outsource at all, knowing when a business actually needs an MSSP will settle it faster than any price list.

Frequently Asked Questions#