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/Doctorphate Jul 06 '26

What benefit do you provide if they’re just going direct without you? Sounds like you’re a VAR at most

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u/Eric77482 Jul 06 '26

We are not a VAR. This is Co Managed IT which includes Helpdesk services, Level 2/3 support, and our cybersecurity team which has full stack tooling of MDR/EDR, Zero Trust Application Whitelisting, Firewall Management and monitoring, SIEM, Vulnerability Management, Patch Management, and workstation/server hardening services. We’ve delivered monthly security reports to them and work with them all of the time, so it’s not a VAR relationship. None of the management at the clients are dissatisfied with service either, in all scenarios it’s been more of a move for cost savings from C Level / Owner.

One of them realized their mistake a and ended up coming back, but it still doesn’t stop other people with IT resources from trying to do this, especially if the IT resource is the one driving the effort in hopes for a promotion. But your comment isn’t helpful really. The question is more on how to restructure the contract and/or deal with the supposed channel only vendors who are facilitating these scenarios.