Huntress pricing 2026: buying direct vs buying managed

Huntress publishes its prices, which most managed detection vendors do not. That makes this an unusually easy comparison to run, so let us run it honestly, including the parts that do not favour us.

Disclosure: Obsidian Ridge is a Huntress MSSP partner and delivers Huntress-powered managed detection and response. Read the recommendations below with that in mind. The math and the "buy direct" cases below are the ones we tell prospects to run themselves before committing to us.

Short answer

Below about 18 people, with one computer each, buying Huntress through a managed provider is usually cheaper than buying it direct, because a direct purchase carries a 50-seat minimum you pay for whether you use it or not. Above that, the direct licence costs less on paper, and the difference is what pays for someone to operate it.

What Huntress charges

From the Huntress pricing page, as listed on 29 September 2026:

Source: huntress.com/pricing. Prices change; check the live page before you budget against these.

The minimum is the part people miss

The same page sets out three different purchasing routes, and they do not carry the same terms:

"There is a Huntress-required 50 minimum seat count per product when doing so." (direct purchase)

"When purchasing through a reseller there is a Huntress-required 50 minimum seat count per product."

"When purchasing through an MSP there are no Huntress-required minimum seat counts."

Source: huntress.com/pricing.

That distinction decides the whole comparison for a small practice. A reseller hands you a licence and you operate it, so the 50-seat floor applies. A managed provider operates the platform for you, so it does not.

Obsidian Ridge sells the managed motion. We deploy it, tune it, and run it. That is why our plans start at one person.

The math, including where we lose

Ridge Core is $25 per person per month, month to month, no minimum. Against a direct purchase at the 50-seat floor, where Huntress' own calculator reads $8.99 per endpoint, and at 100 endpoints, where its product card reads $7.99 (Huntress publishes no rate in between, so there is no 75-endpoint row), assuming one computer per person:

Three honest footnotes. The direct column is Managed EDR only, while Ridge Core also includes Managed ITDR, which bought direct is a second product with its own 50-seat minimum. Our onboarding is a separate flat fee disclosed in the proposal ($500 under 25 agents, $1,000 for 26 to 100), so month one is higher than the table shows. And Huntress states that higher committed volumes get lower rates, so a large direct buyer may do better than list.

Under 18 people, a direct purchase means paying for seats you do not have. A twelve-person dental practice buying direct pays $449.50 a month for 50 seats and uses twelve of them. The same practice pays $300 a month for Ridge Core, and somebody runs it.

Above 18 people, what is the difference buying?

At 50 people the gap is $800.50 a month. That is the honest number to interrogate, and the fair way to think about it is: what would that buy you elsewhere?

Part of it is Managed ITDR, which the direct column does not include. For the rest you get:

• Deployment done correctly the first time
• Ongoing tuning
• Escalation that reaches a named CISSP-led practitioner rather than a queue
• Incident response coordination when something real happens
• The compliance evidence package that carriers and auditors ask for: the HIPAA, ABA, FTC Safeguards and SOC 2 artefacts that otherwise live in somebody's head

You cannot staff 24/7 ownership for $800 a month. That is the actual argument. It is not that the licence is worth more through us. It is not; it is the same licence.

The bundles, for completeness

Ridge Plus and Ridge Reserve bundle more Huntress products. At direct list prices:

Ridge Plus also covers email protection and a secure browser for work apps. Ridge Reserve adds a written incident response plan with a yearly ransomware tabletop, a quarterly admin-access review, a monthly patch report and a yearly refresh of the cyber-insurance questionnaire. None of those appears in the Huntress price list above.

The same logic applies, plus one thing worth saying: each of those products carries its own 50-seat minimum on a direct purchase. A twenty-person firm buying the Ridge Reserve equivalent direct is paying three separate 50-seat minimums.

When you should buy direct

We would rather tell you this than have you work it out later and feel sold to.

Buy direct if all three are true:

1. You have 50 or more endpoints, so the minimum stops costing you anything.
2. Somebody in-house will consistently own alerts, remediation and follow-through. Not "we will keep an eye on it," but an actual named owner with time allocated.
3. You have no compliance evidence requirement, or you already produce that evidence yourself.

If that is you, buy direct. You will pay less for the same detection platform, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

When managed is the better buy

• You are under 18 people. The minimum makes direct more expensive, and there is no argument to have.
• Nobody owns security today. Buying a platform nobody operates is the most common way small businesses waste a security budget.
• You need evidence, not just protection. Carriers and auditors ask what you did, when, and who reviewed it. That is a documentation practice, not a product feature.
• You want one number. Deployment, operation, escalation and reporting in a monthly figure you can plan against.

The partnership disclosure at the top of this article applies here too: we have an obvious interest in the second list being longer than the first. We have tried to keep the first list honest anyway. It is the one that decides whether we are the right call.

What to do with this

Count your people. If the number is under 18, the price question is settled and the only remaining question is whether you want somebody to run it. If you have over 50 endpoints, get a direct quote from Huntress and a proposal from us, and compare the total including who does the work.

Our pricing is published in full, including onboarding fees and the things that are not included. If you want the numbers mapped to your actual environment rather than a table, Talk with us.

Two closing notes. If an insurer or a client questionnaire is what put this on your desk, price is the second question — the first is what you will be able to attest to truthfully, which is a cyber insurance readiness problem rather than a licensing one.

And if the managed route is the one that fits, managed detection and response is what that looks like here in practice.