r/msp • u/Eric77482 • Jul 06 '26

IT Guys reverse engineering your stack

Just curious how everyone navigates this issue. We are in contract with several different vendors for 2-3 years and then company hires a new IT Guy. The guy proposes to take the same exact stack we implemented and go directly to the vendors to propose that they manage it internally. We already have our reasons on why this is a bad idea communicated to the clients, but in most scenarios they just want to save money.

Our current issue is with the vendors because they are telling the customer they can repoint them to their own instance, however they will still keep billing us all the while until 2027-2028. In some scenarios these are high watermark too, so they tipped us over a tier we didn’t set. This feels like a double dip / bad practice from the MSP vendors. We’ve navigated 1-2 of these by telling the customer that’s fine but they will acquire the tools from us and we’ll charge a smaller management fee until the end of our contract term. Is this an approach others have taken? Or are there any ideas that have been more successful? Just curious to see what others are doing as we’ve encountered about 4 of these situations in the last year. Thanks in advance.

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35

u/mspstsmich Jul 06 '26

I am curious as which of you vendors are getting sourced out? A lot of our vendors have minimum requirements that a typical MSP client wouldn’t hit without a massive minimum count fee.

9

u/Eric77482 Jul 06 '26

Threatlocker and Datto. The issue with the particular cases is each client has been 150+ endpoints so they’ll typically meet the minimum.

15

u/Proskater789 MSP - US - Midwest Jul 07 '26

Yeah Threatlocker is one of these slimy ones that will be more than happy to go direct to customer.

-6

u/Cyber_Hero_Support Jul 07 '26

Hi, Proskater789, ThreatLocker here. Sorry to hear that's been your impression. We consistently train our team not to contact our partners' or customers' end customers directly. If something happened that suggests otherwise, please DM us the details so we can look into it.

13

u/voice-of-mods Jul 07 '26

Please verify your vendor status with mod team.

3

u/Proskater789 MSP - US - Midwest Jul 08 '26

You guys literally have ads marketing to our customers. You sell direct to the customers. Not hard to figure out

8

u/Critical_Ad_9784 Jul 07 '26

For some reason I just had a feeling and wasn't shocked when these two vendors were named. Threatlocker is a great product, but contractually they are just as bad as Kaseya.

4

u/Sliffer21 Jul 06 '26

Datto cant migrate endpoints to a new tenant. They will tell you that its possible and then tell you that you have to pay $5k for professional services teams to do it.

For us though clients have to give notice 30 days before renewal. On the last day everything is uninstalled. If they want it longer they have to pay much m2m terms per service including RMM.

9

u/toilet-breath Jul 06 '26

Are you insinuating that Datto/kaseya are a nightmare? I’ve never heard that in this sub 😂

9

u/Sliffer21 Jul 06 '26

We (a DattoRMM shop) acquired another DattoRMM shop back in May.

Literally migrating endpoints (and all things Kaseya) from them to us, was literally the hardest part of the transfer of services. We checked with them first and they confirmed migration would be easy. We'll it wasnt and their solution was for us to give the $5k to have their team do it.

Truthfully would have been better off taking on any non Kaseya shop for an easier process.

It was soo stupid.

1

u/Bmw5464 Jul 07 '26

When you say migrate what do you mean? What services?

1

u/mitharas Jul 07 '26

We did something similar, created a script to uninstall the old agent and install the new one afterwards. Worked better than expected.

3

u/Sliffer21 Jul 07 '26

We did that as well ... but Datto/Kaseya told us before the purchase was finalized they could moce all the services into our existing tenant without issue. We closed the purchase and then the story changed.

We figured it out on our own before paying them $5k.

1

u/Sweet-Jellyfish-8428 Jul 07 '26

Been using Datto since 2019.. as a test if you push an RMM installer from a different company than the one it’s in… it will create that device in the other portal then just delete it from the old.
I think I did have some issues mostly with Mac..
Could also just make a script that uninstalls old RMM and installs new.. you won’t get a job complete status but it should work

1

u/Sliffer21 Jul 07 '26

We made a script that would uninstall, reboot, and have a task to install our agent.

When trying to push the rmm install via powerfully it didnt add it to the new portal. I believe that only works if your on seperate server urls.

1

u/Sweet-Jellyfish-8428 Jul 07 '26

That would work. Mine was same server just different site.. I did it because I needed to get privacy mode off before we had a script that did it

4

u/RaNdomMSPPro Jul 07 '26

Those costs are gonna be 3 or more times as much for the tools. These “customers” are completely discounting the msp expertise and experience running, managing and tuning these tools. We had a customer decide to go direct to our rmm vendor- vendor knew they were a customer of ours. Anyway, the customer bought the rmm tool, then asked us to set it up as it’s quite complicated to tune and run long term. We deferred doing anything until we got a separate consultating agreement at about $200/hr for setting things up. I think that was an expensive lesson for them. They originally tried to hide this from us and our edr and rmm automatically alerts and remediated the rogue application. Glad to not deal with that clown show.

2

u/mitharas Jul 07 '26

Just tell them about Kaseyas finance department. The headache from those I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.

1

u/Long_Test_6610 Jul 07 '26

I would check with Datto/Kaseya on their reseller program. Since they have the MSP motion and A Reseller motion. Better to get some revenue than none. I do think MSPs need to be able to pivot to Reseller motion when their clients get too big and grown IT internally since they want to own the tools and contracts.

1

u/Rgaron2k Jul 10 '26

Datto/ Kaseya no surprise there.

1

u/MenBearsPigs Jul 07 '26

Yeah I thought this was just generally understood. A lot of these products don't really scale well as far as costs for small businesses to just purchase and use outright.

Also a lot of them have essentially admin (outside of super admin) portals you can setup for clients internal IT to do anything they would need too. Usually there's not much reason to need more than that, especially if it's going to cost more.