One number per user. Nothing buried in the appendix.

Critical and high-severity incidents — a full outage, a key system or site down, an active security incident, or a major function impaired for a team with no workaround. Password resets, single-user faults, new starter setups and change requests are logged immediately and picked up at 8am the next business day. We set severity on three objective questions rather than on wording: who is affected, is there a workaround, and which business process is stopped. Agreeing that test up front is what keeps after-hours meaningful and your bill predictable.

No, and we're careful about the difference. Under Fortified we build and maintain your environment toward Essential Eight alignment and report monthly on which controls are in place and which are outstanding. That's implementation work, not a rating of it. A formal position against the maturity model is our separate Gap Analysis, which we run on environments we didn't build. And if you need independent assurance for an insurer, auditor or tender, that calls for an independent assessor — we're your implementer, and we'll refer you rather than grade our own work.

A person with a company login. Shared mailboxes, meeting room accounts, and service accounts don't count. We reconcile the user count with you monthly, so you only ever pay for real people.

Onboarding is charged at one month's plan fee, invoiced on signature. It covers discovery, documentation, tooling deployment, security baseline configuration and handover — and it's backed by our 90-day onboarding guarantee. If your environment needs remediation before we can manage it responsibly — unsupported hardware, unlicensed software — we quote that separately and in writing before anything starts.

Hardware, software licences, and project work (like office moves or major migrations) are billed separately, always quoted in advance. Day-to-day support is never metered.

Yes. Below about 20 users the standard per-user rate doesn't reflect what it actually costs to look after you properly, so we quote those engagements individually rather than pretending one number fits everyone. You get the same plans, the same tooling and the same response targets — priced honestly for your size. Our minimum monthly engagement is $900 + GST.

Professional and Fortified require Microsoft 365 Business Premium. The email security, identity protection, device management and data-loss controls in those plans are delivered through it — without it, we can't provide what we've promised. If you're on Business Standard or below, we'll cover the upgrade during onboarding, or quote you Essential instead.

Yes — upgrade any time, or downgrade at the end of any month with notice. Plan changes are pro-rated; there's no penalty either way.