What one onsite visit actually costs

Nobody buys remote access hardware because it is interesting. They buy it the second time they spend a day driving to a machine to press a key. Run your own numbers below: one avoided trip usually pays for the whole thing.

The number that matters is not the mileage

Ask what a site visit costs and most people answer with fuel. That is the smallest line on the list. A visit to a machine an hour away typically burns:

• Two hours of driving, paid, in both directions
• An hour on site, most of it spent finding out what is wrong
• The fuel, tolls and parking
• The rest of that person's day, which is now gone
• The downtime while everyone waits for them to arrive

The last one is usually the largest and the least measured. If the machine being down stops other people working, or stops orders being taken, the drive is a rounding error next to it.

For anything that needs a flight and a hotel, you are into four figures before anyone has touched a keyboard.

Work it out with your own numbers

Change anything below. Nothing is sent anywhere — the arithmetic runs in your browser.

The number to look at is the third one. With the defaults above — someone on $60 an hour, five hours door to door, and downtime priced at nothing at all — one trip costs more than the hardware that would have prevented it. It pays for itself the first time you don't go.

That is the whole business case, and it does not need a spreadsheet. Everything after the first avoided trip is money you keep, and the device does not stop working at the end of the year.

It only takes several trips to break even if the machine is close, the person going is cheap, and nobody is waiting on it. If that describes your machines, you probably don't need this.

What you put in instead of the trip

That last line in the calculator is a piece of hardware that stays plugged into the machine. Ours is called Beacon, and this is the whole of it:

• It takes the machine's HDMI output, so it sees whatever a monitor would see
• It plugs into a USB port and acts as a keyboard and a mouse
• It has its own network cable, so it is still reachable when the machine itself is not
• You open the machine in a browser and use it as though you were in front of it

Nothing is installed on the machine being controlled. It cannot tell that its monitor and keyboard are somewhere else, which is why this keeps working in the BIOS, at a boot menu, at a recovery screen, and after an update that broke the operating system — the cases that generate the trips.

There is nothing to open on the router either. The device makes an outbound connection and the browser session is relayed to it, so it works at a site you do not control and behind CGNAT.

For the trips that still have to happen, you can send somebody a link to that one machine without giving them an account, and watch the screen while they are standing in front of it.

Beacon is not on sale yet. It will be somewhere between $200 and $300, one time, with no subscription — which is the number the calculator is defaulting to.

Which trips actually disappear

This is where the honest arithmetic matters, because the answer is not all of them. Set that percentage by looking at your own history.

Most teams find the first group is the majority of their trips, because the serious hardware failures are rare and the small stranded-machine problems are constant. Everything in the first group is a screen and a keyboard, which is exactly what Beacon puts in your browser.

Even the trips that still happen get cheaper: you know what is wrong before you leave, so you bring the right part and go once instead of twice.

The cost nobody puts in the spreadsheet

Two more things move the number, and both are invisible until you look:

The trips that never got made. A machine that is slightly wrong, but not wrong enough to justify a drive, stays slightly wrong for months. Remote access at BIOS level makes the fix cost ten minutes, so it happens the same day.

Who has to go. Site visits are usually done by the person who is most capable of doing something else. That hour of driving is priced at their salary, not at what the task was worth.

Common questions

How much does one onsite IT visit cost on average?

There is no honest single number, because the downtime and the salary of

whoever goes dominate it, and both vary enormously. With no travel expenses, no downtime cost, and one person for half a day, the floor is usually a few hundred dollars. Anything involving a flight is four figures.

Is a remote KVM cheaper than paying for remote hands at a data centre?

If your machines are in a colocation facility, remote hands is usually

billed per incident with a minimum, and you still have to describe what you want done and hope it is done correctly. A KVM lets you do it yourself immediately. For machines in offices, shops or homes, there is nobody to call in the first place.

Do I need one on every machine?

One per machine, because it physically plugs into that machine's HDMI and

USB. Start with the machines that are furthest away or that have stranded you before, not with all of them.

What if a trip becomes necessary anyway?

You still save most of the cost of that trip, because you arrive knowing

what the screen said, which part is dead, and what to bring. The expensive version of a site visit is the one where somebody drives out, looks, and drives back for a cable.