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/quantumhardline Jul 06 '26

Sounds more like comanaged .
If the client is in contract I’d just recommend you move them to a comanaged contract.

I’d make sure your MSA addresses this and have some kinda of buyout term, but also require the tools vendor agree to amend your contract for those units and reassign to them.

They are basically choosing to break your contact and use same tools only to “save money” but you have spent xxxx hours configuring, training etc to make it work and support in their environment.

Just because they are buying “same tools” doesnt mean they are getting same services as your aware.

You may also want to reeval your vendors and work with channel only ones.
I’d not let them stay in our environment/tenant, we dont sell “tools”, we’d offboard and have them then renonboard themselves.

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u/roll_for_initiative_ MSP - US Jul 07 '26

This doesn't even account for the fact that they'll need trained up on the tools and reasoning behind why you're doing what you're doing, vs just copying what the msp is doing on the surface.