What IT support costs in Tbilisi
None of these providers publish a rate card, which is the single most annoying thing about buying IT support here. Two of them, Helpdesk and IT24, at least give you a calculator that takes device counts and produces a number.
From how the market quotes, a one-off call-out sits roughly at 50 to 150 GEL. A retainer for a small office of five to fifteen workstations is commonly pitched around 400 to 1,200 GEL a month. Add a server, 24/7 cover, a phone system or security monitoring and you are into several thousand GEL a month. Most quotes exclude 18% VAT, so add it before you compare two proposals.
Pricing is almost always per device, not per hour. Count your workstations, servers, printers, cameras and phone extensions before the first call.
How to choose
Start with what breaks. If your problem is people locked out of email and printers that stop working, you need first-line helpdesk with a real response time. If your problem is a server, a point-of-sale system or a network that keeps dropping, you need engineers who do infrastructure. If your problem is that nobody has ever looked at your backups, buy an audit first and a retainer second. Digitech offers that check for free and Helpdesk sells IT audit as a standalone service.
Three things worth confirming before you sign
- Whether there is a ticketing system. A WhatsApp group is not a helpdesk. Ask what tool logs the request and who sees it if your usual contact is away.
- Who holds the admin credentials. Global administrator on your Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace tenant should be an account you control. Providers who refuse this are building a hostage situation.
- What is out of scope. Hardware procurement, new cabling, office moves and out-of-hours work are usually billed separately. Get the list before month one, not month four.
Red flags
- No written response times, or response times with no severity levels.
- A support quote that arrives without anyone asking how many devices you have.
- Reluctance to give you an inventory of your own equipment and licences.
- One engineer with no named cover. Holidays and illness become your outage.
- Hardware markup buried in the retainer. Ask to see procurement priced separately.
- A provider whose main business is development, hosting or hardware resale.
When you do not need to pay for this
A three-person team on laptops, working entirely in a cloud suite, with no server, no fixed phones and no cameras, does not need a monthly IT contract. Turn on multi-factor authentication, pay for the business tier of whichever cloud suite you use so you get admin controls and audit logs, and call someone hourly when something breaks.
Start paying for a retainer once any of these is true: you run a server or a point-of-sale system, you employ enough people that onboarding and offboarding is a weekly task, you handle customer data that someone could ask you about, or an hour of downtime costs more than a month of support. It is also worth buying a single paid audit even if you never sign a retainer. Finding out your backups have not run since spring is cheap at 300 GEL and expensive at nothing.
If you are still setting the company up, the sequence matters. See our guide to what to do after registering a company in Georgia, and if you run a software business, the Virtual Zone company rules.
