What an IT AMC Costs in the UAE
IT AMC Pricing — UAE
What an IT AMC Costs in the UAE, and What Drives the Number
A plain explanation of how annual maintenance contracts are priced here, what belongs inside the fee, what should stay outside it, and the questions that make two quotes comparable.
Get a Quote After an Inventory IT AMC in SharjahWhy nobody publishes a price list
We do not publish an AMC price, and you should be wary of anyone who does. The same forty desktops cost very different amounts to maintain depending on whether they sit on one floor or four sites, whether there are two servers or a rack, whether the firewall is current or four years past its last firmware, and whether anyone expects an engineer to appear the same afternoon.
What we can do is be specific about what moves the number, so that when you hold two quotes side by side you can see whether they are actually quoting the same thing. In our experience they usually are not.
The six things that set the price
Device count and mix
The base of every quote. Servers cost more to maintain than desktops; network devices sit in between; printers and UPS units are cheap individually and add up.
Sites
Four locations cost more than one, even at the same device count — travel, separate comms rooms, and four times the things that can be unplugged by somebody helpful.
Response commitment
A two-hour response costs more than next business day, because it reserves capacity. This is where quotes differ most and disclose it least.
Preventive visit frequency
Quarterly is standard. Monthly costs more and is worth it in warehouses and industrial units, where heat and dust do the damage.
Security scope
Microsoft 365 administration, MFA, endpoint protection and backup verification. Each can be in or out, and "IT AMC" alone tells you nothing about which.
Age and condition
Out-of-warranty and neglected estates need closer monitoring and more visits in year one. Honest providers price that in; the rest discover it later and renegotiate.
What belongs outside the annual fee
Three things we deliberately keep out, and why keeping them out usually costs you less.
Spare parts
Billed at cost or claimed under warranty. Bundled parts either inflate the fee against failures that never happen, or carry exclusions that remove the expensive ones.
Projects
A migration, an office move or a new firewall rollout is project work, quoted on its own. Hiding project hours inside a maintenance fee makes both harder to judge.
Licences and subscriptions
Microsoft 365, firewall subscriptions and antivirus licences are pass-through costs. You should be able to see what they cost and who owns them.
Five questions that make two quotes comparable
Ask all five of every provider, including us. Where the answers differ, the prices were never comparable to begin with.
Who attends onsite, and from where?
A promised one-hour response means little if the nearest engineer is in another emirate during rush hour. Ask where they actually start from.
Is the response time contractual?
There is a difference between a committed time and a marketing time. Ask for it in the contract, and ask what happens when it is missed.
Are backups restore-tested, or only monitored?
Monitoring tells you the job ran. Only a restore tells you the data is there. The difference is the whole point of having backups.
What happens to out-of-warranty hardware?
Some contracts silently exclude it. That is most of the estate in many UAE offices, so an exclusion there hollows out the contract.
What is explicitly excluded?
Read that list first. It describes the contract more accurately than the inclusions do.
AMC pricing questions, answered
Will you give a ballpark before visiting?
Yes, once we know the device count and the scope you want. It stays an indication until the inventory confirms it, and we will say which way it is likely to move.
Is an AMC cheaper than hiring someone?
Below roughly 50 staff, usually — and it does not take leave, resign, or hold every password. Above that, a hybrid of an internal person with an AMC behind them often wins.
Do you charge per device or per user?
Per device, because maintenance load follows hardware rather than headcount. A user with a laptop, a desktop and a shared printer is three things to maintain.
Can we start small and extend later?
Yes. Server-only or network-only contracts are common starting points, and they extend cleanly once the inventory exists.
What does the first year include that later years do not?
Onboarding: full inventory, documentation, password custody, patch catch-up and backup verification. Year one carries more work, which is why a suspiciously cheap first year is worth questioning.
Get a quote that follows an inventory
Send a device count for an indication, or book the inventory and get a number you can hold us to.
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