A UK professional practice with four users was paying £99 a month for a managed firewall on a contract that auto-renewed. The hardware was fine. The bill was the problem. One UniFi build, purchased outright for £1,487, and the monthly cost stopped.
Diagram showing the replacement of a £99/month managed firewall contract with a £1,487 one-time UniFi build, eliminating recurring fees for a UK professional practice and saving £4,453 over five years.
A 4-person office. £99 a month. On a contract that renewed automatically, for a box they’d never touched.
The practice was paying £99/month for a managed firewall. Not because the service was particularly good, and not because they’d recently decided it was the right tool. The contract had been set up years earlier and kept renewing. Nobody had reviewed it because £99 a month doesn’t feel urgent. It’s not a big line on the P&L. It just sits there.
For a four-user office, a managed firewall contract is rarely necessary. The service model assumes you don’t want to think about networking at all, so you pay someone to hold the box on your behalf indefinitely. The alternative: buy the hardware, configure it once, and own it. The managed contract provides ongoing billing for ongoing access to something that doesn’t need to be ongoing.
Over five years, £99/month is £5,940. The practice had no hardware to show for it and no exit without cancelling the contract.
We spotted the overspend within the first conversation. The managed firewall contract was providing basic routing and security: the kind of thing a modern UniFi gateway handles natively, out of the box, without an ongoing service wrapper. For a four-user practice, that’s the entire requirement.
The spec was straightforward: a UniFi gateway and a managed PoE switch, purchased outright. No subscription, no managed service, no dependency on a third party to keep the lights on. The hardware is configurable, reliable, and supported by a proper management interface if anything ever needs adjusting. For a four-person office, it will likely run untouched for years.
The hardware was sourced, configured off-site, and deployed in a single day. The old contract was terminated. The total cost: £1,487 once.
UniFi gateway and managed PoE switch, configured and deployed on-site in a single day. Hardware purchased outright, owned by the practice, requiring no ongoing contract. Full network reconfiguration, old contract terminated on completion.
Saved over 5 years: £5,940 in avoided contract costs minus £1,487 one-time build
Recurring networking cost after the build. Hardware owned outright, no ongoing contract, no third-party dependency
To spec, configure, and deploy the replacement on-site. Practice was back online before the end of the working day
The monthly cost was small enough that it never felt urgent. £99/month doesn’t trigger a review. It’s below the threshold where someone books a meeting to talk about it. It just renews. Year after year, quietly, because nobody has looked at it recently enough to ask whether it still makes sense.
Over 5 years, that’s £5,940 for a service that a £1,487 one-time purchase replaces entirely. The maths aren’t complicated. The problem is that nobody ran them. Small recurring fees survive precisely because they’re small. They stay under the line where scrutiny kicks in, and they compound quietly in the background while the bigger costs get all the attention.
A first look at the full picture catches them, because it maps everything, not just the things that feel expensive. This kind of finding shows up in almost every engagement. The size of the practice doesn’t change the pattern. Only the total varies.
If your practice has monthly costs that have been renewing quietly for years, have a chat with us. Costs nothing, no pitch, and we’ll tell you straight what a closer look would actually find.
or ring us on 07754 218 688 any weekday