Per-Device Pricing

Definition

Per-device pricing charges the client a flat monthly fee for each managed asset – workstation, server, firewall, switch, printer – regardless of how many people use it. Typical US ranges as of 2026 are $25–$60 per workstation, $200–$500 per production server, and roughly $25–$75 per network device, with the fee covering monitoring, patching, endpoint protection, and routine remediation for that asset.

Why it matters to an MSP

Per-device is the oldest managed services model and the one that maps most directly onto what your tooling costs: the RMM, EDR, backup, and patch management agents are all licensed per endpoint, so every line on the invoice has a known cost of goods underneath it. That keeps quoting and margin analysis simple, and it's honest where devices don't belong to people – shop-floor terminals, nurse-station PCs, kiosks, warehouse scanners – where a per-user price would put you on the hook for far more hardware than the headcount implies.

Its weakness is the same transparency. When each device is a line item, every device gets argued over ("does the conference room PC really need coverage?"), clients quietly leave assets off the list and then expect you to fix them, and revenue stops tracking what drives your labor – people and their problems. A user with a laptop, a desktop, and a phone generates one person's worth of tickets but pays per box, and the shift to two or three devices per employee has moved most MSPs to per-seat pricing for knowledge-worker clients. The common resolution is a hybrid: per-user for staff plus per-server and per-network-device add-ons at the ranges above, so the infrastructure that generates real work is covered explicitly. Worked numbers and model comparisons are in MSP pricing models.

Related terms: Per-Seat Pricing, HaaS, RMM, MRR