All-You-Can-Eat Pricing

Definition

All-you-can-eat pricing is a flat monthly fee – usually per user, sometimes per site – that covers unlimited support within a defined scope: every ticket, remote or onsite, with no hourly billing for covered work. It is the unlimited-support form of the all-in seat price.

Why it matters to an MSP

The model aligns incentives correctly: under break-fix you earn when things break, under all-you-can-eat you earn by preventing tickets. It is also unforgiving. Margin depends on ticket volume per user staying low – typically 0.5–1 tickets per user per month in a well-standardized environment – and every ticket above that is labor you eat. That only works if you control the environment: RMM on every device, current patching, standardized hardware, and the right to refuse unsupported systems. The real risk is scope creep. "Unlimited" is read by clients as "everything," and without a boundary you will find yourself deploying twelve new hires' laptops, migrating a line-of-business app, and running a server rebuild for the same fee. The defense is an explicit out-of-scope clause paired with a service catalog: the contract lists what unlimited covers, states that anything not listed – projects, migrations, new sites, hardware refreshes, third-party vendor escalations beyond a set time – bills at project or hourly rates, typically $125–$250 per hour as covered in MSP pricing models, and defines a minimum-standards rule excluding end-of-life operating systems and unmanaged devices. Add a scope trigger: 20% seat growth or a new location re-opens pricing. Finally, watch the PSA for outliers. A client running three times the average tickets per user is either a root-cause problem you fix once or a repricing conversation at renewal; carrying them silently is how a book loses margin.

Related terms: Per-Seat Pricing, Break/Fix, SLA, Value-Based Pricing