How Much Should a Financial Advisory Firm Pay for IT?

A financial advisory firm should expect managed IT to start at $995 a month. Per seat, a typical financial services firm lands a little over $200 a month, with $300 a seat as the high end.

The monthly figure is the one everybody asks for. The per-seat figure is the one that still means something six months later, after the firm has hired a paraplanner or moved its file server into Azure. Two firms can pay the same $1,900 a month and be nowhere near each other on value, because one of them is also paying Microsoft a second bill that never shows up in the IT line of the budget. Which one is cheaper?

So this piece is about the second bill. Not the range. The range is published, and our breakdown of what managed IT costs across Rockland, Westchester, and Bergen covers it properly. What that piece does not do is explain why an advisory firm sits where it sits, or why the same firm can get two honest quotes that look a thousand dollars apart and both be right.

Everything below assumes you want fully managed IT support rather than a break-fix arrangement, and that somebody has to answer for client data. If you want the service side rather than the price side, that lives on our page for IT services for financial advisors.

Per Seat Is the Only Number That Survives a Model Change

VJNetworks starts at $995 a month, and that is the same floor a plumbing contractor gets. The floor does not move. What changes from one business to the next is how much work sits on top of it, and a firm holding client financial data carries more of that work than a firm that does not.

So run the arithmetic instead of memorizing a monthly band. Five people at the $995 floor is $199 a seat before anyone has bought a single Microsoft license. Divide any quote by headcount and it turns into something you can argue with. Count it all-in when you compare: the managed services fee, Microsoft licensing, and whatever the firm spends on cloud consumption, divided by the number of people.

Where does it top out? Asked whether IT for a financial advisory firm would ever run past $300 a seat, Mike Stoveken, Vice President of VJNetworks, said: “I don’t think it would be higher than 300 a seat, no. I think that’s a pretty high end, 300 a seat.” The typical firm lands a little over $200. Above roughly $300, something is either genuinely unusual about the environment or somebody is being billed for a problem instead of a solution to it.

Why insist on the per-seat unit? Because headcount is the only variable in an advisory practice that moves predictably, and because it is the only unit that lets you compare a firm running its own server against a firm running in Azure.

VJNetworks has been doing this for over 20 years in the Tri-State area, with 97% client retention. When something breaks, someone from my team responds within 15 minutes during business hours, and that response time is inside the number rather than beside it.

One Invoice or Three

Here is the split worth seeing before you sign anything. Keep everything local and your IT cost is close to a single number on a single invoice, with a hardware refresh reserve sitting somewhere else in the budget as a lump every four or five years. Move that same firm into an Azure environment with a terminal server, where everyone works on a server in Microsoft’s cloud instead of one in the back office, and the cost fragments into three streams that arrive from two companies.

Neither model is wrong. They just fail differently, and they budget differently.

Notice there are no dollar figures in that table. Deliberate. I could fill them in and they would read beautifully and they would be fiction, because the numbers come out of your environment rather than out of a chart. What the table gives you is direction.

And the direction is up. Mike is plain about what the Azure model does to the per-seat number: “That all raises the cost per seat significantly. But also builds disaster recovery right into their system.” Both halves are true at once. You pay more every month, and in exchange recovery is part of how the firm already works instead of a separate plan sitting in a drawer.

One more thing about that premium. It is not an advisory-firm cost. An unregulated business that runs the same way pays the same premium, so if anyone presents the Azure line to you as the price of compliance, it isn’t. It is the price of the hosting model.

The Microsoft line is the one to watch. Consumption billing has no natural stopping point, it grows as your storage grows, and it never shows up in the IT line of the budget unless somebody puts it there. If a move to Azure is on the table this year, price the destination, not the trip.

Three things sit outside the monthly number under either model. Hardware. Software licensing beyond what the agreement names. Large projects, meaning an office buildout or a server-to-cloud migration. We say that early rather than let anyone find it on an invoice.

One clarification, because the two get mixed up. Co-managed IT, where a firm keeps its own internal person and we cover what that person cannot, is scoped to what your team already does and priced accordingly. The $995 floor describes the standard fully managed product. Two different things.

Where Regulation Does Change the Number

Industry moves the number less than the hosting model does. It still moves it. Two nine-person offices, one regulated and one not, do not cost the same to run, and the difference is not a rate. It is how many hours a month go into producing evidence that nobody would otherwise produce: documented policies, records of who can reach client data, and proof that the controls are switched on.

The controls themselves are not exotic. Mike’s view of compliance frameworks is that they ask for the same things in different words: “So they can call it whatever they want, but it’s all the same kind of practices and technologies.” Multi-factor authentication, encryption, access control, backups. What a regulated firm adds is the paper trail that shows those things are in place, and keeping that paper current is a recurring cost, not a one-time project.

Which rulebook applies depends on how your firm is registered. For a state-registered adviser, the security baseline is the FTC’s Safeguards Rule, and we walked through it in our GLBA Safeguards Rule checklist. Whichever rule applies, the controls underneath it are the same list.

The Licensing Line Moved on July 1

Most pricing guides treat Microsoft licensing as a rounding error. It stopped being one this summer.

Microsoft’s published commercial pricelist changed effective July 1, 2026. According to the licensing update Microsoft posted itself, Microsoft 365 Business Basic went from $6.00 to $7.00 per user per month, an increase of about 17 percent. Business Standard went from $12.50 to $14.00. Business Premium did not move. It stayed at $22.00.

Sit with that for a second, because the direction is the opposite of what people expect. The cheap tiers went up. The security tier held. Business Premium is the tier that adds identity protection, device management, and threat protection, which are the controls a firm holding client financial data should be running anyway, and as of July the gap between it and Business Standard narrowed from $9.50 to $8.00 a seat.

Eight dollars. Per person. Per month. For a nine-person practice that is $864 a year to close most of the distance between an office suite and a security posture, which makes it one of the cheapest security decisions a firm that size can make.

Microsoft also says existing customers stay on current pricing until renewal. So the increase does not hit everyone in July. It hits each firm on its own renewal date, which is why some advisors have already seen it and others have not yet.

What the Custodian Covers, and What It Doesn’t

There is a line of reasoning that keeps advisory IT budgets small, and it runs through the custodian.

It goes like this. The client assets sit at the custodian. The custodian is a large institution with its own security program, and it provides the portal everyone logs into. So the security problem is handled and the IT budget can stay small.

Half right. The custodian secures the custodian. Only the custodian. What it does not secure is the laptop your advisor opened the portal on, the mailbox where a client emailed a wiring instruction, the CRM holding years of household notes, or the phone that receives the sign-in prompt. Every one of those belongs to your firm, and so does the responsibility for the client information on it.

The custodian relationship makes those endpoints more valuable, not less. A firm with no custodial relationship has data worth stealing. A firm with one has data worth stealing plus a trusted path to somewhere money moves.

Five Questions That Change the Quote