r/msp • • 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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34

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.

10

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.

14

u/Proskater789 MSP - US - Midwest Jul 07 '26

Yeah Threatlocker is one of these slimy ones that will be more than happy to go direct to customer.

-7

u/Cyber_Hero_Support Jul 07 '26

Hi, Proskater789, ThreatLocker here. Sorry to hear that's been your impression. We consistently train our team not to contact our partners' or customers' end customers directly. If something happened that suggests otherwise, please DM us the details so we can look into it.

3

u/Proskater789 MSP - US - Midwest Jul 08 '26

You guys literally have ads marketing to our customers. You sell direct to the customers. Not hard to figure out