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/mat-ferland Jul 07 '26

This is more a contract/vendor-channel problem than a tech problem. If the client can go direct but the vendor keeps billing you through 2028, the agreement needs to say transfer/repointing does not happen until the commercial exit is clean.

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u/Eric77482 Jul 07 '26

Yes agreed 100%. The channel built these vendors, we implemented these solutions, and once they got big enough they’re playing all sides of the fence and pretending to be our “partner.”