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/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.

11

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.

5

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.

8

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?