r/SmallMSP

Hey everyone,

Currently with iDrive for backing up tenants M365. So far no issues other than a clunky interface. They've got local data region, the backups have gone through without issues and covers pretty much everything I need. Even looking into the snapshots seem fine although I haven't gone ahead with a recovery yet. No minimum user count either and pricing - can't complain.

Seeing most people recommend Afi.ai instead so just wondering if there is truly any negatives to anyone that's used iDrive. Afi.ai price is alright and they've got 50gb storage per person which is pooled together but other than the potentially nicer interface and experience, anyone had troubles with iDrive or is it ok for me to stick with them?

Only have a relative amount of clients at the moment so wanting to just continue with iDrive for long-term but if I need to switch early, I'm looking at settling for a good option now hence.

Thanks all!

Good afternoon, r/SmallMSP! First time poster here.

Are any small MSPs here actually using NetLock RMM, Tactical RMM, or something else open source? I’m not sure I’d consider Tactical, but I saw NetLock mentioned in another thread today and it looks pretty interesting.

For context, we’ve been happy NinjaRMM customers for 3+ years. We were an unhappy VSA customer before that. No real complaints with Ninja. It works very well. We only use the RMM; we don't use their ticketing, docs, backup, network monitoring, etc.

However, it’s been a tough year. Nobody wants to buy hardware unless they absolutely have to and we've had a customer unexpectedly close up shop with very little warning.

Switching to something like NetLock, even on a paid tier, could save us several hundred dollars a month. I’d have to host, maintain, update, and back it up myself. But I’m already doing that for Hudu, Checkmk, Ruckus SmartZone, etc., so would it really be that much more work? I could run it on-prem in our vcenter or throw it on a DigitalOcean droplet/K8s.

I’m not unhappy with Ninja by any means. I’m mainly trying to decide whether saving a few hundred dollars a month is worth taking on another piece of infrastructure.

I've looked at Syncro and Atera, and if they both had plans without the PSA stuff I would be a lot more interested. I don't want to change our PSA.

For anyone actually using NetLock or Tactical in production: how has it been? Reliability, security, client/device management, anything you’ve learned the hard way? Is updating a chore?

Im leaving this here because I see people asking about many aspects of profit here but Im yet to see a post replying to all of them at once, soooo here it is.

Growing profit boils down to 2 things, either charge more for the same work, or spend fewer hours per dollar billed. Hiring adds capacity, not margin. So, for margins:

- Automate repetitive delivery: patching, monitoring, routine remediation, and onboarding steps are hours a script can take back. Each thing automated is capacity returned without a salary. This, of course, doesn't mean you have to (or can or should) automate everything, especially with the current AI frenzy going on. Calm down, people.

- Fire or reprice unprofitable clients: some clients eat support hours far past what they pay, and it stays hidden until you track contribution margin per client. Reprice them or let them go and use the recovered capacity on better fit clients. Do not be afraid to let a client go.

- Resell a service line under your own margin: Im only gonna speak of the one I tried myself, password management. We serve a lot of EU clients that ask for it under NIS2 and GDPR anyway, so when we found that Passwork has an MSP partner model we capitalized on it immediately. We pay a wholesale per-user price, then resell at a higher cost, so basically thicker wallets for no additional work. Each client's data sits in an isolated database with an audit trail so they're all safe, no issues so far.

- Bundle and price on value: tiered bundles raise average revenue per client and simplify the sale. Instead of a client picking line items, they choose bronze, silver, or gold, and each tier folds in more services at a price set on the outcome, so the higher tiers carry the fatter margins while, paradoxically, offering the most options. Example: a flat per-seat managed plan at 90 euros covers helpdesk and monitoring. Wrap that same delivery into a Gold tier at 130 euros that adds security awareness training, a compliance review, and priority SLA, and the extra 40 euros is mostly margin because the added services cost little incremental labor given that the process is already established.

- Consolidate the tools you use: overlapping platforms cost money and slow techs with context-switching. One core PSA/RMM and cutting the extras lowers spend and gives better vendor leverage.

Good luck! I'd also love to hear any corrections/additions you guys have.

I'm a small potatoes IT consultant for small businesses. Many of my clients want me to resell the machines to them instead of them going to a retail establishment.

I use Carbon Systems and D&H. However, I might have to replace D&H due to some reasons I won't go into here. Does anyone know of a good wholesaler that a small IT business can purchase PCs, small to mid sized servers, and printers for markup and resale? I don't want to use Amazon, CDW or MicroCenter, as those are full retail prices. I also don't want a supplier or distributor who forces all their "partners" (hate the word) to jump through a bunch of hoops just to sell a handful of PCs or ethernet workgroup printers a year. I also won't do "sales quotas." I don't serve the vendor, they're supposed to serve me.

Anyone (again, small) have good luck with a distributor that doesn't make them jump through hoops?

Reiterate:
No hoops to jump through (Except W9 of course)
No CDW
No Amazon
No MicroCenter (Despite that I like them OK)
Not Retail
No Quotas

I know it's asking a lot and there aren't a lot of choices for us little guys.

Thanks

Just curious if anyone else is doing cold email only and what results are you seeing per 1k sends. What industry do you try and tackle? Sales cycle etc.

Or do you think there's a better niche to target?

Did a big campaign on Meta thinking it would net our MSP lawyers and they never seem to book. Running out of ideas. Need to find a client fast.

Hello ladies and gentlemen,

Im jason, veteran and current WGU cyber student. I got my start in IT at community college after the military. I graduated with an associates degree in Cybersecurity and Computer Systems in 2023. Duriny my ethical hacking class i discovered a trojan spyware (virustotal confirmed) in ch 11 of my ethical hacking text book, it was capable of evading defender and malwarebytes. I hated the feeling of being hacked so much that I decided to spend all of my time from that moment on coding my own solution. Throughout that time I earned my A+, net+, sec+, Linux Essentials all from WGU and used that knowledge to reinforce my solution. I soon realized I invented a new detection method that currently did not exist. At the time I knew of (AV, EDR, FIM, ALLOWLISTING, and some next gen firewall that was blackbox). My method was none of these things. I have done all of this while watching the job market for cyber crash before even getting my bachelors degree from WGU. With all of these major tech layoffs I thought what are the chances of me getting a job in cyber? So, i took a chance and continued working on my detection method. I decided to turn it into a business because I have grown to love this project so much I decided one day that I would like to do this every day for the rest of my life. My thought was if there was less jobs in cyber why not make my own? It has not been easy. I have been working hard on this every single day more than a full time job since December 2023. Im saying all of this because I think this tool/platform could be useful to MSPs. And if its not, I really want it to be, I will work my nuts off. I want this to work so bad. please. Would any MSP owners want to mentor me?

Sorry for this long post but I dont know any MSP owners personally so this felt like my best shot? And i apologize if it was a rough read. Believe it or not i did edit this, but i get so nervous about "putting it all out there" that I get anxious I guess maybe because I feel like i have more to say or as if I didn't say it well enough.

Hey everyone,

Quick question for MSP owners: How do you handle clients who ask for complex data platform work, database migrations, or AI automation when it falls outside your team's core scope?

I have more than 14 years of experience in the data domain building data platforms, and I recently launched my company to focus exclusively on specialized Data & AI architecture and cloud modernization:

Building Modern Data Platforms: End-to-end data platform setup, telemetry, and pipeline architecture.

Modernizing Data Platforms & Cloud Migrations: Migrating legacy data workloads to AWS/GCP and modernizing data infrastructure.

Everything as Code : Repeatable, fully version-controlled environments.

AI-Driven Productivity: Implementing AI tools and workflows to boost client operational efficiency.

Because our focus is strictly on specialized data and AI Engineering, we do zero helpdesk, endpoint management, or traditional IT support.

We’re looking to connect with established MSPs who want a reliable, non-competing partner to handle out-of-scope data projects either as a trusted referral partner or as a white-label backend execution team for your client projects. As we grow our client base, any traditional MSP or helpdesk opportunities we encounter will go straight to our partner network.

If you are turning this kind of work away or want to explore partnerships, shoot me a DM or let's chat in the comments !

How are you guys supporting/accessing Macs?

I hate them with a deep burning passion but a lot of my smaller clients use them.

EDIT: Gone with rustdesk selfhost and Action1 for patching.

Not looking to use expensive mac-only services right now, nor will people pay the extra for it.

I recently got my first client as an msp for a small advertising agency.

They pay me about 500€ per month and besides the initial handover from their previous it support guy, the workload is very comfortable for me.

Yesterday their office secretary asked me for the domain and email administration access.

I asked why? They said:
"I asked for admin access so I don’t have to bother you."

Do you also get funny requests like this?

I am not sure how I ended up in this group, but would some of you be so kind as to answer some questions?

1. What is an MSP?

2. If it is what I think it is, how could any be left, except in small rural locations?

Helping my friend register his first domain and i want to make sure he doesn't make the same mistakes i did. First thing is don't buy it bundled with hosting separate registrars are cheaper and you actually own the domain second, check renewal prices not just first year some registrars lure you in with cheap first year then jack up the price third, make sure privacy is included shouldn't have to pay extra for that fourth, check the 60 day transfer lock rules. If you might want to move it, don't renew right before fifth, look at the dns management interface some are impossible to use.

one-man shop here, and the thing that took me way too long to figure out is that the big backup vendors are priced to make your smallest clients unprofitable, kind of on purpose.

a BCDR appliance + per-endpoint on a 10-seat dentist office eats the whole margin. more flexible licensing helps but the mental overhead per tiny client still adds up. so for a couple years I was quietly subsidizing my smallest accounts and calling it "growth."

switched the small-client tier to a managed agent + storage I control: image backups to a Backblaze B2 bucket per client, running MSP360 Managed Backup. storage runs at object-storage rates instead of a per-seat markup, so a 10-user client's offsite backup costs pocket change instead of half the retainer. immutable object lock for the ransomware angle, which the cyber-insurance questionnaires ask about now anyway.

the part that actually matters for a solo shop: it's documented and handover-able. the recovery runbook is a doc plus credentials the client owns, so if I get hit by a bus or want to sell the book someday, whoever takes over isn't locked out of a vendor cloud.

not saying rip out your turnkey stack where it works, appliances are great when a client will happily pay the premium to have one vendor to call when it breaks. but for the sub-15-seat tier this fixed my margin. honest catch: the initial upload drags on a big client, and the discipline of actually test-restoring is on you now, the tool won't nag you into it.

what's everyone else running for the small tier? feels like nobody builds a properly priced product for exactly this segment.

I recently took on a new client in the health care industry. They have around 15 office employees and approximately 60 field CNAs/nurses who spend most of their time traveling to patients' homes.

Right now, a lot of their communication happens through WhatsApp and other unmonitored consumer apps, which obviously raises concerns around security and compliance.

The client is looking for a better way to communicate quickly with their field staff. These users don't really need email, SharePoint, or the full Microsoft 365 experience. Their primary need is instant messaging, group communication, announcements, and basic collaboration while they're on the go.

My initial thought was to license the field employees with Teams-only licenses, but I'm curious what others in similar health care environments are using. Has anyone implemented a communication platform for a workforce like this? If so, what worked well, and were there any compliance or management considerations I should be aware of? Also, how would you price something like this?

Thanks in advance for any recommendations or experiences you can share.

Looking for opinions on the current ticket management systems

If you have used any of the major ticket triage systems:

• What features weren't there that you think would make things run smoother/better? For example, setting a wrong category, priority, or confidently wrong resolution or client?
• How well did the system handle messy tickets? Did it collect related tickets into one?
• How well was AI integrated into the system? Did it summarise tickets well? Did it gather relevant context that usually wouldn't be present?

Any other opinions are welcome

Looking for some advice because our IT team is getting overwhelmed lately. We spend way too much time on small issues like troubleshooting devices checking why something isn't working resetting stuff and chasing tickets. I'm looking for an AI tool that can actually help with IT problems not just a chatbot that gives generic answers. I need it to help technicians find solutions faster automate simple tasks keep track of tickets and maybe even monitor issues before they become bigger problems. Has anyone tried any AI tools for IT support that actually made a difference?Would appreciate any recommendations or things to stay away from 🙏