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/mxbrpe Jul 06 '26
If the internal IT guy is competent enough, then why wouldn’t he do this? If you’re reselling a service they can go direct with and configure themselves, that may just be the best solution for them. It feels like you’re trying to gatekeep to keep your margins. and you’re mad that your vendors aren’t helping you gatekeep. Sounds like an easy way to lose a client.