A managed services proposal has to do two jobs at once: convince a non-technical buyer you’ll keep their business running, and pin down scope precisely enough that you don’t bleed margin on out-of-scope work. This page walks through the exact structure — section by section, with a worked per-user pricing example — then shows how ProposalBuild’s MSP proposal software drafts it, defines SLA tiers, and tracks what the client actually reads. Built for managed service providers and IT consultants.
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The mistake most MSPs make is leading with a price list. A managed services agreement is a multi-year relationship, and the buyer — often an office manager or a CFO, not an engineer — is really asking “can I stop worrying about IT?” The structure below answers that question first and gets to numbers last. Use it as a checklist; every section earns its place.
Per-user pricing for a 40-seat professional services firm
This is the part clients scrutinize hardest, so show your work instead of dropping a single monthly number. Take a 40-employee accounting firm on the Silver tier. Rather than “$4,800/month,” break the seat price into what it actually buys — the same line items you committed to in the scope section. The totals below are illustrative; plug in your own per-seat costs and target margin.
| Included per user / month | Rate |
|---|---|
| Help desk & remote support | $45 |
| Monitoring, patching & maintenance | $25 |
| Endpoint security (EDR + managed antivirus) | $18 |
| Microsoft 365 backup & management | $12 |
| Security awareness training + MFA management | $10 |
| vCIO / quarterly business review (blended) | $10 |
| Per user, per month | $120 |
| Monthly recurring × 40 users | $4,800 |
Then add a one-time onboarding fee to cover the 30/60/90 work — documentation, agent deployment, MFA rollout, and backup verification — that happens before the agreement becomes profitable:
| One-time onboarding | Amount |
|---|---|
| Environment discovery & documentation | $1,500 |
| Agent, EDR & backup deployment (40 endpoints) | $2,000 |
| MFA rollout & security baseline | $1,500 |
| One-time onboarding total | $5,000 |
Presenting it this way does two things: it makes a $4,800/month number feel earned instead of round, and it gives the client something concrete to compare against the next MSP’s quote. When a competitor comes in at “$95/user” with no line items, your itemized breakdown is what wins the room. In ProposalBuild you build this as a smart pricing table once, save it as a template, and reuse it for the next prospect with the seat count swapped.
Want the full document to copy? Grab the managed services proposal template for a recurring MSP agreement, or the IT services proposal template for a one-off project like a migration or network refresh. Both live in our proposal templates hub.