San Antonio businesses pay $40 to $90 per user per month for a standalone managed cybersecurity program, or $138 to $200 per user per month when security is bundled into fully managed IT. Regulated work adds 20% to 40%.
Not one cybersecurity company ranking on the first page for this question in San Antonio publishes a price. I checked all of them. You get “contact us for a custom quote” and a page about threats, which is how a market ends up with buyers who cannot tell a fair number from a bad one. So here are ours, and everyone else’s, with the math underneath. If you want the service side rather than the price side, that lives on our San Antonio cybersecurity services page.
Short version. Security-only coverage in San Antonio runs $40 to $90 per user per month. Bundled with managed IT it runs $138 to $200. The band is wide because providers quote different products under the same word. Ignore hourly rates, ignore directory averages, and price the thing by what it covers at 2am on a Sunday. Hiring instead of buying costs about $856,500 a year here for round-the-clock coverage, which is why almost nobody under 400 people does it.
What cybersecurity services cost in San Antonio
Managed cybersecurity in San Antonio is a monthly per-user fee covering endpoint detection and response, email security, identity protection, log monitoring, vulnerability scanning, and incident response, priced separately from help desk and device support. Most Bexar County businesses land between $40 and $90 per user per month for that scope alone.
Here is what that looks like as an actual budget line, before licensing.
| Users | Security only, monthly | Bundled with managed IT, monthly | Security only, annual |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | $400 to $900 | $1,380 to $2,000 | $4,800 to $10,800 |
| 25 | $1,000 to $2,250 | $3,450 to $5,000 | $12,000 to $27,000 |
| 50 | $2,000 to $4,500 | $6,900 to $10,000 | $24,000 to $54,000 |
| 100 | $4,000 to $9,000 | $13,800 to $20,000 | $48,000 to $108,000 |
| 250 | $10,000 to $22,500 | $34,500 to $50,000 | $120,000 to $270,000 |
Wide bands. I know. The width is the honest part, and it is not evasion, it is the range of things being sold under one word. A provider quoting $40 and a provider quoting $90 are frequently not selling the same product at different margins. They are selling different products. The $40 version might be a licensing bundle with automated alerting and a shared inbox behind it, while the $90 version carries staffed overnight analysts who will call your operations manager at 3am and start isolating machines without waiting for permission.
Two things narrow it fast. Your headcount, because per-user rates fall as you add seats once the fixed cost of onboarding and platform licensing spreads across more people, which is why a 15-person firm and a 120-person firm rarely see the same figure for identical scope. And your regulator, because a dental group under HIPAA and a machine shop with no compliance exposure buy very different amounts of documentation.
Where you land inside the band comes down to four things, and none of them is how good the provider’s marketing is. How many endpoints each person carries, whether your identity lives in Microsoft 365 or something older and stranger, how much legacy equipment is still in the building, and whether anyone has to produce evidence for an outside party. Those four. In that order.
Security only or bundled with IT? The two numbers that keep getting confused
Ask any AI assistant what cybersecurity costs and it will hand you both numbers in the same breath, one paragraph apart, without telling you they measure different things. That is not the machine’s fault. Almost nothing published on this topic separates them either.
Security only means a security program running on top of IT support you already have, whether that is an internal team or another provider. You are buying monitoring, response, and evidence. Nobody is fixing printers. That is the $40 to $90 band.
Bundled means one per-seat fee covering help desk, patching, backup, vendor management and the security stack together. That is the $138 to $200 band, and it maps onto what we track for managed IT cost in San Antonio, which runs $125 to $200 per user before the security layer thickens.
Getting these confused is the single most expensive mistake in this process. A company with a decent internal IT person asks four providers what security costs. Two quote $65. Two quote $175. The $175 quotes look like gouging. They are not. They include a help desk the company already has and does not need to buy twice.
Fix it before you send a single email. Decide which product you are shopping for, write it down, and put the same sentence in front of every bidder so that the proposals you get back can actually be laid side by side without an hour of translation work first.
One more wrinkle worth knowing. Some providers will not sell you the standalone version at all, because monitoring an environment they do not control means inheriting somebody else’s patching failures while carrying the response obligation, and a fair number of firms in this market have decided that trade is not worth the margin. That is a legitimate position, not a dodge. Ask early rather than late.
What you actually get at each price tier
Price bands mean nothing without the scope attached. This is roughly how the San Antonio market stacks up, and the last column matters more than the first.
| Tier | Per user, monthly | What is in it | Where it stops |
|---|---|---|---|
| Baseline hygiene | $25 to $45 | EDR, email filtering, MFA enforcement, patching, security awareness training | Alerts fire into an inbox. Nobody is watching at 2am |
| Monitored | $40 to $90 | Adds 24/7 SOC, SIEM log correlation, dark web monitoring, vulnerability scanning, a tested incident response plan | No compliance evidence package. You can be secure and still fail an audit |
| Compliance aligned | $90 to $150 | Adds control mapping, evidence retention, audit support, risk assessments on a schedule, vCISO hours | Still not an IT department. No help desk, no device lifecycle |
| Bundled with managed IT | $138 to $200 | Everything above plus help desk, endpoint management, backup, vendor management | Specialist project work stays hourly |
The jump from baseline to monitored is where most of the real risk reduction sits, and it is only about $30 a seat. That is the cheapest security decision available to a San Antonio business and the one most often deferred. Do that one first. The reason it matters is timing rather than tooling, because ransomware crews schedule around your staffing, and the guidance CISA publishes through StopRansomware keeps returning to the same point about detection and response windows that close long before anyone reads an alert on Monday.
The jump from monitored to compliance aligned buys paperwork. That sounds dismissive. It isn’t. If you handle patient data or client funds, the paperwork is the product, because a control you cannot evidence does not exist during an investigation, an insurance claim, or a client security review, and all three of those tend to arrive at the worst possible moment.
Watch the second column and the fourth together. A quote that sits at the top of one tier while describing the scope of the tier below it is the most common form of overpricing in this market, and it is easy to catch once you know the ladder exists.
Why San Antonio security doesn’t price like San Antonio IT
Here is where the local advice goes wrong, including some of ours.
San Antonio is the cheapest of the three big Texas metros for managed IT. Our own Texas MSP pricing index says so, and it is true. Buyers reasonably assume the same discount carries into security. It does not, and the wage data explains why.
Figures below are May 2025 annual mean wages for information security analysts from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, loaded at 1.43x for benefits and taxes. That multiplier is the ratio in the BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation release for Q1 2026, where total compensation for private industry averaged $46.60 an hour against $32.60 in straight wages.
| Texas metro | Annual mean wage | Fully loaded at 1.43x | Analysts working in that metro |
|---|---|---|---|
| San Antonio | $125,830 | $179,937 | 1,350 |
| Houston | $126,880 | $181,438 | 2,110 |
| Dallas-Fort Worth | $133,790 | $191,320 | 7,080 |
| Austin | $136,890 | $195,753 | 2,390 |
Look at the spread. Every metro in that table sits inside 8 percent of every other one. A security analyst in San Antonio costs almost exactly what a security analyst in Austin costs, which is not remotely true of a help desk technician, where the local gap is real and providers price it in.
Security labor prices statewide. Help desk labor prices locally. Different markets. Same invoice. That distinction explains most of the confusion here, and it is the reason a San Antonio provider can undercut a Dallas provider on managed IT by a visible margin and then quote within a few dollars of them on the security line without either one being dishonest about it.
Now look at the last column, because that is the column that actually bites. San Antonio has 1,350 people doing this work. Dallas-Fort Worth has 7,080. Same wage, roughly a fifth the pool. When your one security hire resigns in March, your Dallas competitor is fishing in a lake and you are fishing in a pond.
There is a local reason for the tightness. San Antonio’s security labor market competes directly with the 16th Air Force at Lackland, the National Security Agency’s Texas operation, and the cluster of federal contractors around Port San Antonio, all of which pay well and clear people for work that a 40-person accounting firm cannot match on prestige or budget. Your competition for that hire is not the MSP down the street.
What it costs to run security in-house here
Every owner asks this eventually. Usually right after the third quote lands. Why not just hire somebody? Fair question.
Do the arithmetic honestly and the answer is uncomfortable. One fully loaded San Antonio security analyst runs $179,937. Round-the-clock coverage is not one analyst, it is 4.76 of them, because a year holds 8,760 hours and a real person delivers about 1,840 productive ones after vacation, holidays, training and sick time.
That is roughly $856,500 a year in salary and benefits alone. No SIEM licensing. No EDR platform. No threat intelligence feed. No manager. Just five people and a rotation. That’s it.
| Company size | In-house 24/7 coverage, per user per month | Outsourced, per user per month |
|---|---|---|
| 25 users | $2,855 | $40 to $90 |
| 50 users | $1,428 | $40 to $90 |
| 100 users | $714 | $40 to $90 |
| 250 users | $286 | $40 to $90 |
| 475 users | $150 | $40 to $90 |
You need somewhere near 475 users before an in-house rotation costs the same per seat as a well-run outsourced program at the top of the market. Against a $40 tier, the crossover sits north of 1,700 people. Almost no company in Bexar County is there. The reason outsourcing wins so decisively at these sizes is not that providers are cheap, it is that the cost of a 24/7 rotation is fixed and indivisible while the customers paying for it are not, so a provider running one rotation across 60 clients is spreading the same $856,500 sixty ways.
One more number I find clarifying. At 4.76 analysts per rotation, the entire San Antonio metro holds enough information security analysts to staff about 283 round-the-clock security teams. Total. Across every bank, hospital, base contractor and managed provider in the city. That is the supply you are competing for when you decide to hire.
None of which means never hire. A strong internal security lead paired with an outsourced SOC underneath is an excellent structure, because the internal person owns context and priorities while the outside team owns the rotation, and neither one is asked to do the part they are worst positioned to do. What fails is one person, alone, expected to cover nights.
The arithmetic above is also charitable to the in-house option. It ignores the SIEM licensing, the EDR platform, the threat intelligence subscription, the annual training budget, and the fact that five analysts need someone to manage them, all of which land somewhere between $60,000 and $200,000 a year depending on how many endpoints you are ingesting logs from. Add those and the crossover moves further out, not closer in.
What compliance adds to the number
Regulated work costs more, and the increase is not really about security tooling. It is about proof.
Budget 20% to 40% on top of your security line if you fall under HIPAA, GLBA, or PCI-DSS. That covers formal risk assessments on a schedule, evidence retention, policy maintenance, workforce training records, and somebody who answers an auditor’s questions without billing you hourly to look things up. A healthcare group in the South Texas Medical Center and a manufacturer off Loop 410 can run identical security stacks and pay meaningfully different amounts, entirely because one of them has to prove it. Proof costs money. Always has.
Defense work is a different category and does not behave like a percentage. NIST 800-171 and CMMC compliance in San Antonio arrive as a project first and a monthly fee second, and for JBSA-adjacent suppliers the assessment work usually dwarfs the ongoing cost in year one. Healthcare practices should start with HIPAA cybersecurity requirements rather than a generic quote, because the control set is prescribed and the pricing follows it.
Texas gives you a reason to care beyond the regulator. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center ranked Texas second in the country in 2025 on both counts that matter, with 97,912 complaints and just over $1.82 billion in reported losses. Second nationally. Not second in some sub-category.
The costs that sit outside the monthly fee
The per-user number is not the whole bill. These are the line items that surprise people, and any honest provider will name them before you ask.
- Onboarding. Deploying agents, tuning policy, and cleaning up whatever the last provider left behind. Commonly $100 to $250 per user as a one-time charge.
- Licensing. Microsoft 365 Business Premium, backup, and a password manager typically add $30 to $50 per user per month on top of any managed fee.
- Penetration testing. An annual external test for a small business runs in the low five figures and is usually excluded from monthly coverage.
- Incident response beyond the plan. Retainers cover the plan and the first hours. A full forensic engagement is billed separately, everywhere, by everyone.
- Cyber insurance. Not a service, but it moves with your controls, and the questionnaire is getting harder every renewal.
Ask for the fully loaded first-year number, not the monthly rate. Providers who lead with the lowest per-user figure often carry the highest onboarding charge, and you will not see it until the proposal.
Run the same comparison at month 36, not just month 12, because a three-year total is where escalator clauses, per-device adders for every new server or firewall, and after-hours rates in the $200 to $250 an hour range stop being footnotes and start being real money. A quote that wins on year one and loses badly on year three is not a cheaper quote. It is a slower one.
How to read a San Antonio cybersecurity quote
Before anything else, throw out the directory numbers. GoodFirms lists a $25 median hourly rate for San Antonio cybersecurity firms. A loaded local analyst costs about $86.50 an hour, per the wage data above. Nobody in this city is selling security engineering below the cost of the engineer, so that median is measuring something other than what you are buying, and anchoring on it will cause you to reject every legitimate quote you receive. Clutch is closer to reality on hourly work at $150 to $199, but it reports project minimums rather than recurring coverage, which is a different purchase entirely and will not tell you what next March costs.
Then ask these. In this order. Same seven, every provider.
- Is this security only, or does it include help desk and device support? Write the answer down.
- Who watches the alerts at 2am on a Sunday, and are they employees or a white-labeled vendor?
- What is the response time when something fires, and is that a contractual number or an aspiration?
- Which of these are included and which are add-ons. EDR, SIEM, dark web monitoring, vulnerability scanning, awareness training, incident response.
- What is the onboarding charge, and what does the fully loaded first-year total come to?
- What happens to the rate at renewal, and is there a cap?
- If we leave, how do we get our data and our documentation out?
Three answers should end the conversation. A provider who cannot say who is watching overnight. A provider who will not put the response time in the contract. And a provider whose quote drops sharply when you push back, because a price that moves 30% in one phone call was never costed from anything real, and whatever got quietly removed to fund the discount will be missing on the night you need it.
Question 7 gets skipped constantly and it is the one I would keep. Exit terms decide how much leverage you have at every renewal for as long as the relationship lasts, and a provider who owns your documentation, your tenant admin credentials, and your log history has priced that leverage into their renewal whether they say so or not. Ask it on the first call. Watch the pause.
If you still need a shortlist to send those seven questions to, we ranked the field in the best cybersecurity companies in San Antonio. And if you are running a broader evaluation rather than just pricing security, our San Antonio IT buyers guide works through the same exercise across the full technology spend.
What Uprite charges
Publishing this is unusual in our market and we would rather be the ones who do it.
Security-focused coverage starts at $40 per user per month, which buys 24/7 SOC monitoring, SIEM, threat intelligence and incident response layered over IT you already have. Co-managed sits at $100. Fully managed IT with the security stack included starts at $138. Those numbers and what sits inside each one are broken out further on our San Antonio managed security services page.
Two things attached to those prices. Your rate does not increase during the first year, so the number you agree to in month one is the number you pay in month 12. And if it is not working after 120 days you can leave with no penalty. No exit fee. No argument. We have been doing this in Texas since 1999, we have an office at 11831 Radium Street, and 42 people work here.
If you want the number for your actual environment rather than a band, the assessment comes first and it costs nothing. We look at endpoints, identity, email, backup and your compliance exposure, then quote against what is actually there. Call the San Antonio office at (210) 942-8466 or start with a free security assessment.
Questions San Antonio owners ask before they sign
How much do cybersecurity services cost in San Antonio?
Expect $40 to $90 per user per month for standalone managed cybersecurity, or $138 to $200 per user per month bundled with fully managed IT. A 50-person company budgets roughly $24,000 to $54,000 a year for security alone. Regulated industries add 20% to 40% on top for evidence and audit support, and licensing sits outside all of those figures.
Is cybersecurity part of managed IT or priced separately?
Both models exist and the distinction drives most quote confusion. Bundled providers fold security into one per-seat fee. Standalone providers layer security over IT support you already have. If you have an internal IT person, the standalone model usually costs less because you are not buying a help desk twice.
What should a 25-person San Antonio business budget?
Plan on $1,000 to $2,250 a month for security-only coverage, or $12,000 to $27,000 across the year. Add $30 to $50 per user per month for licensing and a one-time onboarding charge of $100 to $250 per user. Compliance exposure moves the whole line up.
Is it cheaper to hire a security analyst or outsource?
Outsourcing wins until you are near 475 users. A fully loaded San Antonio security analyst costs $179,937 a year and 24/7 coverage needs 4.76 of them, which is about $856,500 in labor before any tooling. That works out to $1,428 per user per month at 50 people against $40 to $90 outsourced.
Why do San Antonio security quotes vary so much?
Because the word covers four different products. A $30 quote is usually tools with no human watching them. A $90 quote usually includes a staffed overnight SOC. A $175 quote usually has a help desk inside it. Ask each provider to state their scope in one sentence before comparing anything.
What does a security assessment cost here?
Ours is free and carries no obligation. Paid engagements in the San Antonio market generally start around $5,000 for a formal external assessment and climb past $15,000 with penetration testing attached. Be clear which one you are being sold, because the word assessment gets used for both.
Does a small business really need 24/7 monitoring?
Ransomware operators deliberately work weekends and holidays, when nobody is reading alerts. Before that stage comes selection, and we covered which local industries attackers scan for first. That is the entire reason the monitored tier exists, and it is roughly $30 a seat above baseline hygiene. For a 25-person company that is about $750 a month, which is the cheapest meaningful risk reduction on this page.
