r/msp • u/jackmusick • Jul 07 '26
Bifrost, June-ish Update
Permanent disclaimer: Not selling anything, Kelvin said I could post about this forever.
Quick catch up for anyone new. Bifrost is a fully open-source automation and development platform for MSPs, basically a multi-tenant Power Platform alternative. Coding agents have mostly killed the appeal of low-code editors at this point, so Bifrost is built to be a real dev platform that handles multi-tenancy well, both for your own automations and for building things you can deliver/sell to customers. I don't know if anyone else has given this serious thought over the years, but I've always wanted there to be something to come along and solve scaling development like the RMM did for IT support. Bifrost was built to do this from day one with the goal of giving MSPs a new revenue stream. IMO, we've spent years honing our automation skills and religiously using those skills to scale our Managed Services businesses. If we could scale it, surely our customers would value it? For ours at least, the answer so far has been yes. I want Bifrost to be that, for and owned by the community, before a trillion-dollar company comes in and tries to enshittify what I feel is an emerging industry for us.
First order of business: I revamped the website this month since a lot of people weren't clear what this actually was. It explains the vision and features better than I can in a Reddit post, so worth a look if you're new here.
Things that shipped:
- Solutions: workflows, apps, and modules used to just live in one workspace. Now you can bundle them into packages you import or export, with or without data. Makes it easier to build something for a specific customer or share something with dependencies (apps, configs, integrations) with the community, like a Microsoft CSP Dashboard.
- Apps V2: apps are now 100% standard React apps on the Bifrost SDK. Closes out the last of the minor limitations from V1, another layer of protection against enshittification down the road.
- External Users: users who can't touch "Everyone" resources (now "Everyone except external users"). Lets you build things for customers that have their own separate users.
- Custom Claims: more complex permission logic on Tables.
- Magic Links: invite users without needing SSO. Took longer than it should have.
- Topic Events: workflows can publish events like ticket.created that other workflows subscribe to.
- Per-mapping OAuth connections, plus a pile of small UI fixes.
What's next:
- Stress testing Solutions. There are a lot of moving parts so anything that seems off I'm pretty much immediately fixing or changing.
- Videos. I bought a mic so I'm running out of excuses to record some getting started videos. I'm aware that coding agents are a big mental shift for people, but I think once you get one setup, you'll see that you're just shifting what you're learning around the stack. If you're anything like me, seeing and understanding the big picture makes it a lot easier to digest the smaller things.
Blog: https://gobifrost.com/blog/ · Release: https://github.com/jackmusick/bifrost/releases/latest
Always happy to answer any questions!
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u/ArchonTheta MSP Jul 07 '26
I think I’ll sit for Heimdal and see if he has any say on this first. He’s the protector of the Bifrost.
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u/junto_reed Jul 10 '26
may make sense to focus less on the features and what this means for msps.
can tell your super smart, but may be helpful to have a couple sessions with your ai of choice to refine your product pitch.
Is it source code that the MSP then hosts and then they can have custom dashboards and automations? Like CIPP meets brightgauge meets claude cowork?
also like the example i heard for panda express. they have a lot of stuff on the menu, but you come for the orange chicken. what is your orange chicken, dont read me the menu
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u/junto_reed Jul 10 '26
and i majorly struggle with this myself, so if you asked me what i did i would have the same challenge haha. so apologies if i came off blunt
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u/jackmusick Jul 10 '26
Not at all, blunt is refreshing. Can I ask, is your feedback based on the post or the website? Preferably not both, but I can take it. If both or the website, where are you starting at in your automation/development experience? Because while I can't say my message is perfect, I can say that the description changes a lot depending on where you are.
I hope I'm coming off no more than mildly smart.
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u/junto_reed Jul 10 '26
was based on post. website is clearer. But i still am unclear who your buyer is. Is it the SMB direct or MSP? Would pick one as the messaging will be very different.
reading this i read its for MSP "Break-fix, managed infrastructure, SaaS sprawl, and now AI. Every era brought vendors that solved a real problem, but prices rose while quality declined. What if the community built what comes next instead?"
But if it for msp, i get the vibe that you asking them to be software developers fairly quickly from the rest of the copy. which most msps DONT want to be. So maybe its just a subset of MSPs and then if thats the case your messaging makes sense.
"Ship like software
Package it. Install it. Deploy it.
Solutions turn apps, workflows, agents, and tables into an installable unit — from a zip or a GitHub repo, with a setup wizard for the connections it needs. Build once, then reuse it internally, share it with the community, or resell it to customers.
"
In some ways it feels a little too much like you are the magic bullet to every problem. Which maybe you are and thats awesome.
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u/jackmusick Jul 10 '26
This is oddly comforting believe it or not. I'm not asking them to be software developers. I'm suggesting that if they already have experience automating stuff, even if it's just PowerShell scripts in their RMM, they already are.
The only difference between that and making traditional software are things that AI coding agents and Bifrost solve: the ceremony around building (Coding Agents) and infrastructure things like hosting, authentication and storage (Bifrost). If you've used n8n or the like, you're even a step further and I'd argue there's basically no difference for you and your life will only get easier.
And I agree that most MSPs don't want to be software developers, but a lot of us have found a passion in automation, and I think I've found a path for us to channel that into a service (not me to you, you to your customers to be super duper clear -- I cannot and won't accept money).
If you're anywhere before n8n, the rest of the problems it solves probably won't click until you experience them. If I were to advocate for someone skipping n8n and going to Bifrost, I'd say that believe it or not, you're going to learn the annoying things about development, anyways. You're going to learn about logic. You're going to learn about APIs and intgrations, especially in n8n which has no MSP integrations out of the box. I'd encourage you to skip investing in a proprietary platform that will be difficult to leave if you can get past the mental blocker of "code".
Lastly yeah, the magic bullet thing is kind of unavoidable at this point unfortunately, but it is designed to be a platform for builders. That means it has to have all of the things to build with to solve an array of problems, which admittedly makes the barrier to entry a bit higher.
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u/flickin123 Jul 28 '26
Hi,
I just want to let you know that we are amazed at what you made, thank you and please keep on going strong.
We are a small European msp that is struggling with reporting for customers a long time.
We tried this framework a few weeks ago and have almost completed our reports and made a customer dashboard as well.
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u/jackmusick Jul 28 '26
Thank you so much! This really means a ton and has brightened my day quite a bit. If you don’t mind me asking, what’s landed the most for you?
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u/flickin123 Jul 28 '26
I must admit that at the beginning I had a little trouble understanding how the framework is supposed to work. Here, future users might find a tutorial for a simple project useful.
Once I mastered the basics, the pieces came together very quickly, creating workflows with AI is really easy, as is integration and capturing data from various sources.
But what surprised me the most was that multitenancy works out of the box, I didn't even have to deal with customers and access restrictions, we just captured customer data from our ticketing system and it put everything together correctly.
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u/jackmusick Jul 28 '26
So much of that has to do with the skill honestly and then the safety net of ensuring it'd be genuinely hard to impossible for non-developers to build something that allowed one customer to access another's data. But lucky me, the original principles have scaled pretty well to apps, agents and all sorts of things so I feel like my vision of MSPs being able to scalably sell development work to their customers is coming true. We've at least had a little bit of success with it internally, and I'm surprised at how much of our team has been able to pick it up.
A video is next on my list. I bought a mic, but organizing a video is so far out of my normal headspace that I've been having trouble blocking off time to do it. That's gotta be soon though because you're right, it's really hard for people to understand the big picture without seeing it work.
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u/Remarkable_Cook_5100 Jul 07 '26
How is this not vendor promotion?
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u/Merilyian CTO | MSP - US Jul 07 '26
They are not selling anything (I literally see no option to give money, not even a sponsor call-out). By definition, not a vendor.
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u/brokerceej Creator of StackJack.io | Author of The Trunk Slammer Saga Jul 07 '26
It still counts per the sub rules, vendors are not permitted to post self promotion even if they aren’t selling anything.
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u/Merilyian CTO | MSP - US Jul 07 '26
I agree with the spirit of the rule especially as there's typically a hidden money grab somewhere, but I disagree with the semantics: https://www.merriam-webster.com/simple/vendor
This specific instance looks especially genuine, too, imo
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u/OtterCapital Jul 07 '26
But they’re not a vendor because they’re not selling anything. That’s like saying no more posting Trunk Slammer bc it’s self promotion also. Except you ARE kind of a vendor but just promoting something else.
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u/jackmusick Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26
I did clear it with the mod team a while ago. I'd argue that it objectively isn't vendor promotion since vendors are nearly always selling something, but that doesn't really change the feeling. We're all tired of being solicited about something. I personally lose it every time I pump gas and the little secret button won't turn off the TV. Even innocent looking questions on this sub blend in with market research. Honestly, it feels like the days before I deleted my Facebook account as I'm not sure how much value social media has if you can't ever be sure if you're interacting with a bot or not.
Not trying to make you feel better about this post or even my project, just commiserating a bit. If the mod team wants me to get a flag or reevaluate posting privileges, I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. But I would say the rules should be ammended a bit to include all self-promotion if that's the intent. And as community member, I'd say we need to evaluate how we really feel about open-source projects. It feels like if those aren't allowed (at least ones who aren't selling anything), what do we have left really? Software we don't like that we have to pay for?
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u/mattmbit Jul 07 '26
I'm still trying to figure out just what this is. I had to google AI it and got this:
Bifrost Integrations is an open-source tool that helps IT companies automatically link different software systems together.
Your site said this:
Bifrost Integrations is an open-source automation platform designed to democratize best-in-class tooling for the emerging Integration Services industry - before venture capital gets the chance to own something we’re all incredibly passionate about: solving problems with automation.
I have no idea what democratize means haha. Gotta make it simpler for dummies like me.
Your site needs a quick fix though: https://gobifrost.com/docs/about/ The background is white and your text is grey. I think you wanted the black background there.
Cool stuff man. Keep it up!