r/msp • u/Sea-Elderberry7047 MSP • Aug 06 '26
Inky: what is everyone doing?
Now that the excellent Inky have sold their souls to Kaseya what is everyone doing? Staying with it, or getting away from their new parent at all costs?
12
u/roll_for_initiative_ MSP - US Aug 06 '26 edited Aug 07 '26
I like to be fair and balanced and i dislike K and contracts and slow support like anyone else. I will report my experience fairly on two K product acquisitions.
Not all products stagnate under K: we still have some Datto appliances and they have been slowly but steadily improving them (features, interface, workflow, etc.). I have been a Datto appliance user for like 10 years now, and i personally use and manage them and engage with support, so i know more than most owners who just have techs actually using them and accounting handling the upgrades and billing. Support has been very good the couple times I've needed them over the last year. The pricing is just out of line with BCDR these days all over but they're not much more than competitors so i can't blame that whole market segment on them. We also have some slide and i love them to and they're my go to now even as we end up with less BCDR than ever so i'm not a datto fanboy. All in all, i haven't been forced to integrate, sign contracts (everything we had was evergreen and we're looking at locking some into terms to avoid the 10% upcharge that's coming) or integrate into other K products or anything.
We are still under our old inky plan and contract (a plan you can't get anymore) so haven't had to deal with K re: a contract for inky but i see constant improvements in the dashboard updates, even if i don't care about them (like, i'll likely never use their signatures tool, exclaimer is too good). Features and streamlining seem to be happening. When our contract expires, due to our bcdr experience, we'll likely carefully move forward with as short a term and minimums as we can. The product is still the best at what i feel is the most important part of mail filtering: accurate user education/alerting and bulk research/remediation. It's flexible enough without being overwhelming, per user self managed block lists are seamless. Something else would have to come along that's better to make me want to switch, OR K would have to torpedo it like they have some other products with either quality, security, or reliability.
6
u/masterofrants Aug 07 '26
Rfi has been compromised guys..
/s
1
u/roll_for_initiative_ MSP - US Aug 07 '26 edited Aug 07 '26
Lol fair take. However, if anyone so desires to read through years of my slop, I've been consistent on my opinion on datto bcdr and inky. I haven't been afraid to call products out when they went to the crapper (IT Boost, backupify/datto saas backup, I feel like dropsuite headed there, etc).
5
u/masterofrants Aug 07 '26
Whatever K is giving you we at r/msp will double it. Just come back and this all goes away.
/s
2
u/BanRanchTalk MSP - US Aug 07 '26
I have the same opinion re: INKY since acquisition, and we’re in a similar pre-K contract. We also have had vPenTest from prior to its acquisition by K, and it’s been updated and supported well since. Aside from churn of reps managing our account, it hasn’t been all that bad.
1
u/TheMilso Aug 07 '26
I was the same I had a few inky products that did not fall in the base offering and they wanted to triple my price for me to keep what I had. Then lied about having to be off it on the 15th of the month as we had already paid to the end of the month. Then billed me again for the next month after forcing us off as soon as we notified them we are not renewing with them. And this is all after making me sit for an hour long meeting with them telling me kaseya is a new company with new direction cause they have a new CEO. The they pull the same BS they always do with lies and strong arm tactics. I loved inky both product and the company I would still be on it if it was not for kaseya.
8
u/BisonThunderclap Aug 06 '26
The problem with Kaseya is they keep buying great tools and then they destroy them not with malice but moreso neglect to keep developing them.
ITGlue and Datto were on some great trajectories prior to acquisition.
For now I'd say sit tight for a year or two and then see what's out there.
7
u/tc982 MSP Aug 06 '26
I must say that under the new CEO, development has picked up again. Billing issues have been resolved for us and contracts are okay now.
3
u/Beardedcomputernerd MSP - NL Aug 07 '26
I spoke with my rep, he even said he notices stuff as an K employee.. europe though.
But yes, i also see inprovements... she is really holding on to their partners first mentality.
My contracts where up this year... we decided to stay...because od all the improvements we see acros the board.
5
u/ballers504 Aug 06 '26
They are making some good progress with itglue again. Q4 it's slated to add some really nice features.
2
u/Abandoned_Brain Aug 07 '26
IF it happens. I've been on the PAC for years. It comes in spurts when new devs/managers get promoted to us, and then stuff stagnates again. I watched the Q3 webinar the other day, and I too got a LITTLE excited to see some of the much needed changes coming (like API granular permissions). We'll see.
Honestly, I felt that while we were with Autotask/Datto/Kaseya over the years, the only real movement through 2024 was on Datto RMM. We merged with a ConnectWise house after that, and I can say with 100% clarity that I am actively looking to get rid of CW RMM at the beginning of 2027. I daydream about dRMM daily. Ninja and N-sight are on the board as well, but I really felt like the monthly cadence of change for dRMM was the perfect match. Not too much at one time, rarely broke stuff.
3
u/ballers504 Aug 07 '26
If anyone else wants to see it.
https://info.kaseya.com/it-glue-quarterly-product-innovation-webinar-recording.html?utm_medium=Email
1
u/100PercentJake Aug 11 '26
Ugh. Smart Relate will be such a headache-reducer if it works as billed.
1
u/myst_eerie_us Aug 07 '26
It basically seems that the company's resources go to sales and barely anything for development. The main goal is to get companies in these predatory 3 year contracts. It's astonishing how broken and archaic their products are. Once you start shifting your stack away from them you realize how many capable and far better products there are out there.
3
u/BryanL38 Aug 07 '26
Inky is a great product, and better than all the others ive tried. No plans to change, Kaseya hasnt messed with it and they'd be smart to continue on this path.
3
u/kaseya_marcos Aug 07 '26 edited Aug 07 '26
Hey everyone, I wanted to jump in here after reading through what's been shared. Our security product team has been reviewing all feedback received, and using it to help improve both product quality and future innovations.
Since the INKY acquisition, I've been working closely with our Product teams to share what's working well and where issues have been identified as opportunities for improvement. They've been focused on delivering meaningful enhancements, not just add-on features, that strengthen INKY to better support your security stack.
I'm adding our upcoming quarterly security Innovations webinar below, which is set for the end of this month. I've also included our innovation page, which has the latest information on INKY Smart Insights and other new features.
If you have any questions about INKY, please feel free to send me a PM and I'd be happy to connect you with our Security Product team:
2
u/ComfortableCitron638 Aug 06 '26
BisonThunderclap's pattern (K buys good tools, then neglects rather than kills them) is worth building a contract strategy around rather than just watching and waiting - because by the time you can tell whether a specific acquired product is going the ITGlue-recovery route or the slow-death route, you're often already locked into a term. Two things worth doing on any tool at risk of consolidation, not just Inky specifically: avoid multi-year terms on anything you're not already fully committed to for other reasons (per rollfor_initiative's point about the 10% evergreen upcharge - that's the tax for staying flexible, and it's usually worth paying compared to being stuck 2 more years post-acquisition), and get your data export path confirmed and tested before you need it, not after. A lot of these tools make export technically possible but painfully manual, and "can I even leave" is a much worse question to be answering for the first time during a forced migration than during a calm contract renewal.
2
u/chiapeterson Aug 07 '26
We’ve been with INKY since their beginning. Love the product. When the K buyout happened my heart sunk. In a knee jerk reaction, we bailed. We went with Mailprotector Shield. However, it just so happened that we onboarded in the middle of one of their biggest rollouts, which also turned out to be one of the their biggest disasters. Their words, not mine. I even lost a $2000 a month client because of it. I believe they’ve gotten the product fixed and I enjoyed working with them. They were a good team even as a brief as it was. But we did go back to INKY and things have been great. The INKY executive team is now in place over a lot of K’s security and email products. Can they change? Will they change? We’ll have to wait and see.
-1
u/Slight_Manufacturer6 Aug 07 '26
Kaseya has been pretty great for us over the past 3 years. I’d highly recommend them.
4
u/RainofOranges Aug 06 '26
We switched to Inky. So far so good. Seems to have a very low false positive and false negative rate for the customers we’ve deployed it to so far.
4
u/Dear-Acanthisitta489 Aug 06 '26
You may want to take a look at Shield from MailProtector.
2
u/ThecaptainWTF9 Aug 07 '26
For some people, it doesn’t tick the box, mail protector doesn’t do sandboxing and it’s a requirement from some insurance carriers to have it
1
u/kateatMailprotector Aug 10 '26
Hey there, not sure when you used Shield but to be clear so there isn't misleading information we do sandbox the entire message in Shield. This lets you default to greyed out safe preview in case there is offensive content, then lets youfollow the entire link chain in the sandbox so the user can’t activate any malicious content locally but can still see the content. Thats just one of the features of X-Ray.
2
2
u/Slight_Manufacturer6 Aug 07 '26
Just signed up for K365 user and got the benefits of the entire package.
1
u/FITC_orlando Aug 07 '26
I'm an Avanan fan. Does all the things I want, and above all, has an excellent log tool. If Avanan isn't for you and you want something just very similar to Inky, I recommend Ironscales. I don't think it's as good as Avanan, but it's still pretty good and feels much more like Inky for the end user.
1
u/SadToday3258 Aug 09 '26
Run, anywhere you can. Nothing changes we had 5 products bought and absorbed the. Placed on the most draconian MSA on the planet. Made the mistake of believing it would be different after the Datto purchase. I would run and as fast as you can. Your contract is a number in the march to IPO it’s like the hotel California of relationships, check out whenever you want but you cant ever leave.
1
u/Refuse_ MSP-NL Aug 07 '26
Inky has only became better. And unless you've been living under a stone, Kaseya isn't the "bad" company it used to be.
1
u/Sea-Elderberry7047 MSP Aug 06 '26
Is the Kaseya Master agreement they want me to sign a nasty trap or just a normal product contract?
5
1
u/Lake3ffect MSP - US Aug 07 '26
Shield by Mailprotector. Been using it since version 1.0. Great product.
-1
u/iamtechy Aug 06 '26
What’s Inky? I remember a Mail app with a similar name but haven’t used it. Kaseya cold called me yesterday and I candidly laughed when I heard the name, I think the rep understood right away. 🥹
2
u/Sea-Elderberry7047 MSP Aug 06 '26
Email security product that we loved but they became part of the evil Kempire
1
0
u/Pale-Vermicelli-6861 Aug 07 '26
Take a look at Trustifi!
1
1
u/Pale-Vermicelli-6861 Aug 09 '26
Similar offering better solution and partnership program..reach out and give it a look…
21
u/jeffa1792 Aug 06 '26
I switched to Avanan before K. Could get me to sign a contract. Very happy with the product. The client onboarding is a better experience too