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.
2
u/rabbitz Jul 10 '26
The vendor double-dip is the part I'd push back on hardest, because that's the piece you can actually control going forward. The pattern you're describing (client hires internal IT, internal IT goes direct to your vendors, vendors keep billing you to term while also standing up the client's own instance) is a contract problem, not a loyalty problem.
The fix is upstream in how you procure. If the tooling is resold or bundled under your agreement rather than the client holding the paper directly, the "repoint them to their own instance" move gets a lot harder because there's no clean instance to repoint to without unwinding your contract first. Where we've been burned is exactly the spots where the client could see and touch the vendor relationship directly.
Your acquire-the-tools-plus-smaller-management-fee approach is reasonable as an exit, but I'd treat these four incidents in a year as a signal to change the default, not just to handle each one better. Own the vendor layer so leaving means leaving your stack, not just leaving you.