The Real Cost of Not Having IT: What Remote Teams Get Wrong
SaaS waste, security gaps, and founder time burned on password resets. The cost of no IT is higher than you think.
Most remote companies don't have an IT person. They have a collection of workarounds, a few Notion docs, and a founder who occasionally resets passwords.
It feels free. It isn't.
The SaaS problem
The average company with 50 employees uses over 100 SaaS tools. Without someone actively managing that stack, licenses pile up. People leave and their seats stay active. Teams sign up for overlapping tools without realizing it.
Industry estimates suggest companies waste $4,000 or more per year on unused SaaS licenses per team. That's real money disappearing into auto-renewals nobody's tracking.
The security gap
Here's a stat that should keep founders up at night: roughly 40% of ex-employees retain access to corporate applications after leaving. That's not a theoretical risk. It's a concrete one.
Without formal offboarding, access lingers. Shared credentials don't get rotated. MFA isn't enforced. Device encryption isn't verified. And when a customer sends you a security questionnaire, nobody knows the answers.
The founder tax
Every hour a founder spends troubleshooting a VPN issue, provisioning a new hire's accounts, or figuring out why someone can't access a shared drive is an hour not spent on the business.
It's invisible because it doesn't show up on a balance sheet. But it compounds. If a founder spends just five hours a week on IT tasks, that's 260 hours a year. More than six full work weeks.
The onboarding drag
New hires should be productive on day one. In practice, most remote companies take three to five days to get a new employee fully set up. That's because onboarding is a manual process that nobody owns.
Accounts get created one by one. Devices show up unconfigured. MFA enrollment happens sometime in the first week, maybe. The new hire's first experience of your company is waiting around for access.
What it actually costs
Add it up: wasted SaaS spend, security exposure, founder time, slow onboarding, inconsistent offboarding. For a 50-person company, the hidden cost of not having IT easily exceeds $50,000 a year.
A fractional IT retainer costs a fraction of that, and it doesn't just save money. It creates the systems that let your company operate like a company, not a startup held together by Slack threads and good luck.
The fix isn't complicated
You don't need a massive IT overhaul. You need someone to own it: audit your tools, set up proper identity management, build onboarding and offboarding playbooks, enforce basic security, and keep things running month to month.
That's what fractional IT is. And for companies at this stage, it's the most cost-effective investment you can make.