For sole traders and one-person businesses

IT Support for Sole Traders and Home Workers

ARK Care is built for people working for themselves from a spare room or a kitchen table — not for offices with staff and servers. If that's you, our sister company ARK Assist is the better fit.

An honest word first

ARK Care was built for ordinary home users and people working alone — sole traders, freelancers, tradespeople who invoice from a laptop. If you've got staff, a server, or a network to think about, you'll get a lot more from our sister company, ARK Assist, who do proper business IT support day in, day out.

If it's just you, working from a spare room, ARK Care is genuinely a good fit — the same care and technicians, at a home-user price.

The problems we see most often

The people we help are rarely dealing with anything exotic. It's usually: one laptop everyone relies on and nobody's kept an eye on; an antivirus subscription that quietly ran out; a backup drive sat right next to the computer it's backing up, so a break-in or a nasty infection takes both; or a laptop stuck on an old version of Windows because the updates kept getting put off.

Every one of these is cheap to sort in advance and expensive to sort afterwards. A day you can't work costs more than a year of cover.

What we do for you

Your device is set up so a technician can see how it's doing at a glance, not just when something goes wrong.

  • Set your laptop or PC up with sensible, business-suitable protection
  • Install updates overnight so they don't get in the way of your day
  • Keep your antivirus working, with alerts coming to us rather than getting missed by you
  • Back your work up to secure UK storage, and flag it to us if anything fails
  • Filter out dodgy websites at the network level on Pro, so phishing links don't even load
  • Move you up the repair queue and take 20–30% off labour if hardware fails

Getting set up

Tell us how many devices you've got and we'll point you to the right plan. You install it yourself from a download link — a couple of minutes per machine — or book a remote session and we'll walk through it with you.

Most people working for themselves go for Pro, for the web filtering, deeper protection and included backup, though Shield is plenty for a lower-risk second device.

Working alongside email and cloud storage

ARK Care sits alongside things like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace rather than replacing them. Cloud email and file storage protect you if you lose one file or one folder, but they won't tell you a hard drive is dying, they won't update your laptop, and — this catches people out — a synced cloud folder will happily copy a ransomware infection to everywhere else it's synced. That's why looking after the device itself, and having a separate backup, still matters.

What's included

Priced per device
£9.99 to £34.99 per device a month, with a lower price if you cover three or more.
Proper protection, not a free trial
Managed antivirus on every plan, with deeper protection and web filtering on Pro.
Backup we keep an eye on
500GB of monitored backup comes with Pro; you can add more if you need it.
Straight to the front of the queue
Being unable to work is treated as urgent — Pro devices go first in the workshop.
One report, not a pile of emails
A single monthly update covering everything on your account.
One bill
Everything — devices, extras, remote sessions — on one invoice, monthly or yearly.

What it costs

Someone working alone on ARK Care Pro pays around £34.99 a month, covering monitoring, deeper threat protection, web filtering, updates, 500GB of backup and a VPN. If you've only got a second, less important device, Shield or Plus covers that more cheaply. Paying yearly works out at ten months instead of twelve.

Frequently asked questions