What IT Outsourcing Actually Costs in Saudi Arabia — With Real Numbers

Search for what IT outsourcing costs in Saudi Arabia and you will find the same sentence on every result: *contact us for pricing*. We checked, across the commercial queries buyers actually type, and not one provider in this market publishes a rate. That is not an accident of website design. A number you cannot see is a number that can be set after the vendor has worked out what you can afford.

So this article does the opposite. Below are the real, published figures from our own rate card — the same ones the IT outsourcing page shows and the same ones the configurator charges from — for one specific, ordinary Saudi office. You can check every one of them on this site without speaking to anyone.

An example: what a 20-person office costs

A price only means something next to a scope, so here is one worked example, in full. Your own numbers will differ — this is one office, not a package, and the point of it is that you can check every figure against your own device counts on this site.

The example office has twenty people. One firewall, one switch and two wireless access points. Twenty laptops and a printer. One physical server and one virtual machine. Twenty Microsoft 365 accounts. Four cameras and a recorder. Backups running on the laptops and the server. Multi-factor sign-in for the staff and antivirus on the devices.

It is a real shape rather than a convenient one — roughly what a twenty-person head office in Riyadh or Jeddah actually contains — and it is deliberately smaller than our typical client, so the figures read as a floor rather than a best case.

What each area costs, per month

These are on annual billing. Monthly billing is available and costs about 25% more, which is the honest trade for the shorter commitment.

• Cameras and recorders — 4 cameras and 1 recorder: SAR 45 a month.
• Network — 1 firewall, 1 switch and 2 wireless access points: SAR 276 a month.
• Security and identity — 20 staff on multi-factor sign-in and 20 devices on antivirus: SAR 300 a month.
• Servers and virtualization — 1 physical server and 1 virtual machine: SAR 378 a month.
• Backup and recovery — 20 laptops and 1 server backed up: SAR 399 a month.
• Cloud — 20 Microsoft 365 users: SAR 400 a month.
• Endpoints — 20 laptops and 1 printer: SAR 1,269 a month.

Why endpoints cost more than everything else combined

It surprises people, and the reason is simple: twenty laptops means twenty people. A firewall does not call the help desk. A laptop does — for a password, a printer, a broken update, a new starter, a lost device, a screen that will not wake up. That is where the day-to-day work of supporting an office genuinely sits.

It also means the example above is priced at the small end. The more devices of a kind you cover, the less each one costs, so an estate several times this size does not cost several times as much. Twenty is about as expensive per device as it gets.

The four things that actually move your number

1. How many devices, per class. Not headcount. Twenty people with a laptop each and twenty people sharing eight terminals are different estates, and they price differently.
2. Which areas you hand over. Handing over network alone is a different contract from handing over the function. Most buyers start with one.
3. Service level. Depth of work and response commitment, not permission to raise requests — the number of requests is never capped.
4. Annual or monthly billing. Annual is roughly 25% cheaper, in exchange for the year.

Notice what is not on that list: how big your company looks, which industry you are in, or how the discovery call went. Those things move a quote in this market. They do not move a rate card.

What to compare it against

The honest comparison is not against another vendor's hidden number — it is against what you are paying now, including the parts that never appear on an invoice. If you are weighing this against hiring, the costs people forget are set out in in-house IT versus outsourcing in Saudi Arabia. If you are comparing contract shapes rather than prices, IT AMC versus managed IT services explains what each one actually commits the provider to.

Who is quoting these numbers

Satmz is the short name of SAT Microsystems, delivering IT across Saudi Arabia since 2003. Support is run from ISO 27001- and ISO 9001-certified, ITIL-aligned operations, with partner status held with Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle and Fortinet, and on-site attendance across twenty Saudi cities.

What is different is not the engineering — it is that you just read our rates without asking for them. The help desk runs 24/7 in Arabic and English with no out-of-hours surcharge and no cap on requests, and the boundary between what support covers and what is a project is written down before you sign.