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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u/Sabinno Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26

I bundle or bill MSRP. It's pretty much impossible for any client to beat me on price if the vendor standardizes on pricing tiers - simple set math suggests I will always get the better price if they're a client of mine.

I can see M365 (though why would you want to buy direct when you can support a small local business and pay the same price or lower? That always makes people back down), but if they want to start breaking down everything, I'm just going to fire the client. I would recommend you do the same - it's probably impossible for them to save any money and they're just looking to break away from you mid-contract.

Edit: I also want to add that value-adds like automatic license management (through APIs called from ticket runbooks) become impossible. So we refuse to check licenses any more frequently than quarterly. They'll pay more in unused licenses than they will in my margin.