This question comes back in every company once it crosses roughly 20 people. "Maybe we should just hire someone full-time instead of paying those external folks?" It sounds reasonable. Most often it ends up costing more than the previous arrangement — because the decision is made on intuition rather than on the numbers.
This post isn't an ad for any of the models. It's about when it actually pays to have an in-house IT person, when it's better to keep IT external, and when the most sensible move — because in SMEs this is the most common case — is to do both at once, but deliberately.
The myth of "one IT guy who handles everything"
The first trap most SME owners fall into sounds like this: "we'll hire one IT person and that'll be it". The reality is that IT in even a small manufacturing or trading company is at least five different specialisations: helpdesk and end-user devices, network and servers, security, ERP/CRM/WMS administration, development and integrations. One person can't do all five at a decent level. Those people simply don't exist — and if they do, they cost as much as two staff and they won't go to a 30-person company.
In practice, "one-person IT" in an SME looks like this: the employee is good in one or two areas (usually the ones from their previous job), and so-so in the rest. The network kind of works, backups are "set up", updates happen "when there's time". As long as nothing breaks, everything looks fine. The first serious situation — a leak, an outage, ransomware, an ERP migration — shows what this model doesn't cover.
The real numbers — what each option actually costs
The numbers we see in Polish SMEs in 2026 look roughly like this:
- Mid-level in-house IT. Salary of PLN 11,000–14,000 gross per month. With employer social security, holidays, equipment, training, tooling licences — the real cost to the company is around PLN 180,000–230,000 per year. Plus an occasional external specialist when something falls outside their skills.
- Basic outsourcing (helpdesk + administration). A standing SLA contract at PLN 4,000–8,000 per month for a 20–30-person company. Plus projects billed separately. Real cost to the company: PLN 70,000–140,000 per year in "the lights stay on, incidents get handled" mode.
- Hybrid model. One in-house person (often as an "IT manager" or senior helpdesk role at PLN 8,000–11,000 gross) plus an external partner for specialist areas (security, integrations, ERP, projects). Total cost: PLN 150,000–220,000 per year, but with a substantially broader skillset than one-person IT for similar money.
Cost is only half the picture, though. The other parameter is availability and continuity. One IT person goes on holiday twice a year, sick leave once a year, and eventually leaves — and the company is stuck for three months without anyone who knows its infrastructure. Outsourcing doesn't have that problem because there's always someone in the team, but it has a different one: the external provider is less familiar with day-to-day production realities and applies changes more cautiously.
A real example: a 28-person wholesaler
At one of our clients — a 28-person automotive parts wholesaler — one in-house IT person worked for two years. Excellent at end-user support and printers, weak on security and integrations. Comarch Optima ran, the B2B shop ran, things kind of worked. After they left, several things came out at once: the backup hadn't been tested in 14 months, the firewall had open ports "because it was easier that way", and the Optima ↔ shop integration was a manual cron job on a laptop that nobody else could start.
The company hired a new in-house IT person. That cost about PLN 9,000 gross per month more than the outsourcing option they had also been considering — and even so, the new hire spent the first three months mostly figuring out how the previous setup was put together. During that time, nobody at the company was running projects. When the VAT rate change finally had to be implemented, it was done by an external Comarch partner — because the new in-house person hadn't dealt with that before.
After six months, management changed the model. The internal IT person moved to a "30% IT manager" role (helpdesk, coordination, documentation), and the specialist areas went to an external partner with an SLA contract for second-line helpdesk and a pool of project hours. Total cost dropped by about 25%, backups are now tested every month, and the integration runs on a monitored server rather than a laptop. Nobody said "outsourcing is best" — it turned out the best option was the mix.
When in-house IT actually makes sense
A full-time IT employee in an SME usually makes sense when at least one of the following is true:
- The company has a specific system whose operation requires daily presence (e.g. an in-house WMS, dedicated production software, an OT/SCADA line). An external provider arrives in two hours, but a line outage costs you PLN 5,000 per hour.
- Working with sensitive data requires someone "on hand" — e.g. medical, legal, accounting firms, where access by external specialists is an additional compliance risk.
- Scale has crossed 40–50 people and the volume of helpdesk tickets alone is enough to fill a full-time IT person's day.
- There's a steady, long pipeline of IT projects (not just helpdesk) that pays to own as in-house competence.
If none of those points applies, hiring one IT person tends to mean an expensive helpdesk with a narrow skillset.
When outsourcing wins
Full IT outsourcing without an in-house person is usually a good fit when:
- The company has up to 20 people, the infrastructure is standard (Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, off-the-shelf ERP, off-the-shelf shop), no OT.
- Processes are reasonably tidy and don't require somebody "running onto the shop floor" every day.
- Management is willing to enforce some process discipline — tickets go through a helpdesk system, not through WhatsApp messages to "Chris", and change policies are written down.
- The company prefers a predictable cost over a salary that, with holidays, sick leave and resignations, becomes a moving target.
The most common outsourcing mistake: picking the cheapest "PLN 3,000 a month, all in" offer. At that price, no one will sensibly look after a 25-person company. After six months the "maybe we'll hire our own person after all" conversation comes back — and the loop closes.
The hybrid model — what usually wins in the 25–50 person range
In practice, in 70% of the projects that pass through our hands, the hybrid wins. Internally, one person stays in the "first-line IT / coordinator" role: someone who knows the company's specifics, runs helpdesk, keeps documentation, coordinates changes. Externally goes everything where the cost of maintaining in-house competence doesn't add up: security, integrations, ERP/WMS administration, software development, migration projects.
Three advantages of this model that come up most often:
- Continuity through holidays and resignations. When the in-house IT person disappears for two weeks, the company doesn't grind to a halt. When they leave, there's documentation and an external team that knows the environment from the other side.
- Real access to specialists. A cyber audit every six months, an integration when needed, a Comarch expert when something requires it — without having to hire five different roles.
- Cost control. The fixed share is low (one salary plus a basic SLA), the variable share is project-based and you can see exactly where the money goes.
The downside of the hybrid is that it requires a deliberate split of responsibilities. Without it, the in-house IT and the external partner start pushing things onto each other or, worse, doing the same work twice. Writing this down on a single A4 sheet takes an hour and pays back over the next two years.
How to decide in your company
Concretely:
- Write down how many people in the company use IT and which systems (ERP, CRM, shop, WMS, OT). That's the base on which you can count how much work there really is.
- Note what your IT did over the last 12 months — and break it into helpdesk, administration and projects. That shows proportions you can't guess.
- Build an honest budget for three scenarios (in-house, outsourcing, hybrid) — accounting for social security, holidays and the risk of someone leaving.
- Check whether, in the last two years, your IT handled the first serious crisis (outage, attack, migration). If it didn't — that's not a question of model, but of competence, and no model alone fixes that.
- Pick the model that gives you a reasonable cost + real competence + continuity. Most of the time it'll be the hybrid — sometimes pure outsourcing, almost never "one person handling everything" in a 30-plus-person company.
If you're not sure what those numbers look like in your case, we help SMEs break it down regularly. The first call is free and takes half an hour.
"One IT person handling everything" in a 30-person company isn't a saving. It's a single point of failure, and only a crisis shows what it really cost.