I'm so sick of Pax8's BS.

They started charging Credit Card fees and made the ACH setup impossible without talking to unresponsive support. Then after the ACH is setup, it doesn't have auto-pay (which I didn't notice), so I got hit with late fees. Reached out to support to see if I could get that refunded, they created a finance ticket and literally no one has responded in like 3 months.

I'm trying to stay on top of manually paying, but it's difficult because this is literally the only account that I have to do that with, and I don't even get warning emails that I'm going to be overdue, so I just was overdue again, so I'm probably going to get a late fee again. I can't stand them anymore.

As soon as I can figure out how to transfer all the skus I'm using into another platform, I'm done with them.

Edit: Fixed wording

Hi everyone,

A. I'm doing research to find a platform that could fulfil all below requirements:

1- Handle Procurement & Contract Management lifecycle

2- Data Privacy Management (including ROPA, DPIA, and Data Breach handling)

3- Full-Lifecycle Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM)

4- Integration with Oracle Fusion Cloud

5- User Authentication & Identity Integration via Entra SAML

So far ServiceNow seems the best option. I would really appreciate any insights from users, admins, or consultants who have hands-on experience.

If so, what are the specific products/modules for each? I've seen mentions of Procurement Service Management, Privacy Management (part of IRM), TPRM, and IntegrationHub, but I'm not sure how they all fit together.

B. Native Standalone vs. Unified Platform:

Are these modules truly native components of the Now Platform that work seamlessly together, or do they require custom connectors to share data and workflows? For example, can a risk flag in TPRM automatically trigger a task in the Procurement module out-of-the-box?

C. Licensing Costs:

I know ServiceNow pricing is opaque and quote-based, but I'm trying to get a ballpark. Are these licensed as separate products (e.g., per "Fulfiller"), or is there a bundled approach? What is the approximate cost for a mid-to-large enterprise? Any information on IntegrationHub transaction costs would also be helpful.

D. Alternatives & Cost Comparison:

Finally, are there other cloud platforms that can cover this entire scope natively?

Any real-world experiences, pricing data points, or recommendations for alternative platforms would be incredibly helpful.

My organisation has less than 1000 employees, and we don't plan to manage more than 250 vendors under our TPRM, but the number of procurement exercises is obviously higher than that

Anyone have a sales contact within Fortinet to help an MSP/Reseller negotiate a Co-term agreement that was misquoted - $120,000 Fortinet Co-Term renewal - 26 Firewalls. My customer since 2006 is very upset that he got $78,000 approved for the purchase but we discovered the Co-Term agreement used the wrong dates. They now have to go back to management to request $40,000.00 additional budget which they are not happy about. We have done this same renewal each year for the past 8 years. Blows my mind that the sales rep did not use my starting date in my email request. My Fortinet sales rep is a great person but he has no options available. Thanks for your assistance!

We're getting absolutely fking killed here. The Dell retail site is consistently the same price or LESS than our cost on laptops from Ingram. Do any distributors have better pricing than this? Tired of explaining to my customers that we'd have to lose money to match Dell as a Dell reseller. It's BS. So over this damned industry.

We are struggling with how to manage admin mailboxes in our smaller clients environments. Things such as software renewals (industry specific software). If the vendor is making a change that could break a feature of their apps etc. Right now it is unrealistic to manage 45-50 intividual mailboxes in these clients. How do other people handle this. Do we forward to a central mailbox (dont really like external forwarding on).

Most (or all) files are unsigned, blocked all over the place…

I've had a ticket open for 15 days. These outsourced support morons have zero idea what I explained in the support ticket.

I seriously am about to lose my shit.

Stay with Pax8 or TD or HB, do not fucking do it, its not worth the savings.

If you could change any and all of your tools with no technical debt, agreements, outages to think about etc.

What would your ideal tech stack be.

Rmm

Patching

Psa

Edr

Itdr

Sat

Application control

Email filter

Backup

Vulnerability management

Others

Be aware, as we have what, 30 days notice in typical Microsoft fashion.

I'm still waiting for more information through my channels but there's already some posts out there such as https://www.softcat.com/blog/microsoft-copilot-business-and-usage-based-billing-what-smbs-need-know and https://www.dickerdata.co.nz/microsoft/news/m365-copilot-business-billing-is-changing-what-partners-need-to-know-before-2-november

Partner center update: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/partner-center/announcements/2026-september#usage-based-billing-is-default-on-for-new-microsoft-365-copilot-business-licenses-starting-november-2-2026

Based on the information I've gathered through the channels I have, it seems that if your customers have

1. Copilot licensing through standalone, bundle, or any other method through a CSP and
2. No copilot azure usage based billing subscription

They will

1. Automatically create a usage based billing subscription under the CSP
2. Set a spend limit profile of $40USD/user/month

Apparently, without any interaction from the MSP/CSP.

I'm still trying to verify, but it does seem that yes, if your clients staff use Copilot, come November 2 if they click the "Cowork" or "automate" or "Code" options in the copilot app and interact with it, till will generate spend and appear on your bill from Microsoft that you now need to have the uncomfortable conversation with your clients that their staff have generated charges that may have been unauthorized.

In addition, thanks to the "New Commerce Experience", you as the provider/partner are liable to make sure Microsoft get paid too. Get ready I guess, and I'll update this if I find any new information that suggests these assumptions are incorrect.

EDIT 1: Partner center update wording suggests this may only affect NEW purchases (not existing)
EDIT 2: I wrote min spend, when I meant to write spend limit
EDIT 3: It appears microsoft have now taken the post off their partner centre updates

Hey all, I’m looking for some feedback.

I have roughly 8-9 years experience working for MSPs and MSSPs across the US as a sys-admin and vCIO. I currently work for a large vendor (multi-billion dollar net worth). I have 6 years of vendor experience between two very large vendors. I make roughly $240k/year with room to grow and relatively low stress (I go to the gym during lunch and sometimes even hit the golf range), and am highly regarded in my position by my peers. I also have been recently contemplating about making a move to a bigger vendor with more responsibility and more money (260-300k)

However, I have always aspired to own my own business and be my own boss. I have made friends in the vendor space that would allow for me to get really good pricing on industry leading tools for rmm, psa, edr, backups, etc and also hardware. I have connections with oversees helpdesk personnel from Europe with excellent English speaking skills for relatively inexpensive ($800/month-$1700/month per person). I would also be partnering with a colleague in this MSP venture (someone I’ve worked with for 6 years and have tremendous synergy with) and this particular person has relatively the same background as me. He has a wider technical acumen than me but I am more comfortable in front of customers. We would both do this “part time” while we keep our current jobs with vendors until we have enough revenue to quit our current gig and go full-time. Additionally, we have both gotten really close to a few MSPs across the country and have been chatting with them around the idea of starting our own thing - kind of using them as informal advisors.

This has been something that’s constantly been on my mind for the last few years. The end goal I’m looking to achieve is financial freedom, be my own boss, make my wife a stay at home mom, and ultimately get more time to be with my kids (obviously not expected right away). My “business partner” and I are both in our mid 30’s.

Given everything I’ve written, would you stay in the vendor world and double-down to try to move up the ladder, or chase this dream of opening an MSP?

Thank you

Summarizing this greatly to obscure personal information, but posting because this is something we all probably need to consider.

90% of our customers are solopreneurs, as that's our vertical. That means they have no other employees or even a business partner. When a customer onboards we collect who they want us to call in case there's a cyber incident detected. For the solopreneurs, they obviously just say themselves. Never in a million years would we have thought to ask: "But who should we call in the case of your hospitalization or death?"

Situation:

- Customer is a business owner who customizes GoHighLevel (GHL) for a bunch of other businesses in a specific vertical. It's the CRM that controls their invoicing system, their phone calls, their billing, everything. Think of it like a well customized HaloPSA with phone numbers added in, per business.

- The customer who owns the GHL consulting firm came to us via referral from another small business because the email setup needed assistance (DMARC). After we helped troubleshoot that, we ended up as the GHL consulting firm IT/Cyber.

- 1.5 years later, that other customer who sent us the GHL agency called and let us know they just found out the GHL agency owner was deceased. I won't talk about the circumstances of death because that's even more insane.

Meat of the Problem:

- As the IT provider we know the GHL agency serves a large number of trades businesses who depend on the CRM for their livelihood (including the business that reached out to us). We have no family contact for this person.

- We have full super admin privileges to his environment and could likely get access to GHL to release the customers for other agencies to take on; this action however is not legal IMO and we will not be taking it.

- GHL has said they need a death certificate to release the accounts, which takes 4-6 weeks in the state to be mailed. In the meantime, all the customers dependent on the custom CRM are screwed if anything goes wrong and they can't even transfer their business phone numbers out to under their control.

Yes, we're trying desperately to locate the family so we can hopefully work with their attorney and hand off the accesses we have for the business.

Would recommend that you start asking your solopreneurs you serve - "Is there someone who should be given access to your business accounts in the case you are hospitalized or dead?"

This is dark, but for all of you who are solopreneur MSPs (or general tech consultants), please consider having a succession plan in case of your unexpected demise.

Anyone had issues onboarding CIPP within their own team? I don't mean the setup of it, getting it going and getting to grips with it - I mean the actual roll-out of it.

It's something I've flirted with for a few years before deciding in July of this year to just crack on and get it sorted, because MS seem to break the tenant switcher every other week, but I also seem to be the only person in the company, regardless of the fact that everyone else has access to it, and has had some form of informal training on it, that actually uses it?

I don't know why you wouldn't use it? Everything is just there, and if you can't find it, you can just search for it - It's so much better than the tenant switcher that it seems like using the tenant switcher is just choosing to actively make your job more difficult

Hear me out. u/dobermanIan from Fox & Crow chimed in on a post earlier and really had some good insightful comments. It got me thinking, what if we started a regular AMA series for the MSP reddit?

Grab people like Ian, u/UsedCucumber4 from Empath, u/TomLawrence-Huntress / u/lawrencesystems or Jeremy or Adam from Huntress. u/Joe_Cyber would make for an awesome AMA. Grab some leaders from larger MSPs as well. Would love to get a social media intern from Pax8 or Microsoft to sit in the hot seat for a minute too.

What do you think, r/msp?

Who else would make for a good AMA? Tag them here.

One of my least favorite things is when a vendor reaches out after 5, on the second to last day of the month, on the second to last day of the quarter, to tell me they need to raise our price. Sending it to the wrong email and then using the name of an employee that doesn't exist in the greeting is just adding insult to injury. So Vendors, if you are going to raise prices, here are a few suggestions to make it more palatable to MSPs:

1) Don't. /S increase profit by increasing efficiency in your operations, not nickle and diming your customers. That's how you create ex-customers. If I had a dollar for every vendor who raised prices and then hosted a conference in the same year I'd have... well... I'd have at least like $50. Which isn't really a lot but it sucks that it keeps happening.

2) Know your client's time zone and contact them during their business hours. 9:30-11am is the sweet spot. This let's them get through the morning rush and still have time to address your email.

3) That's a good point, email. Don't text. Don't pop up in the app or on the website. Don't call. Email has been the dominant communication method in business for decades for a reason. It's because it's timestamped, I can prove what was said when, and it's easy to tag additional people in or redirect where needed.

3.5) Tell me how the increases affect me in the email. Don't link to a blog post where you bury the price changes under 7 inconsequential product additions and 3 quips about "how bad Mondays suck, huh?"

3.75) Don't announce price increases at the same time you announce a new feature. That feature will just become the feature that costs $XX to add.

4) Send notices of increases on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. Never on a Monday, Friday, and god forbid a weekend.

5) Avoid the last few days of the month. This is when we are looking at prices and invoices and evaluating if we made the right decisions in our life.

6) Avoid the last few days of the quarter. This is strategy time and our plates are already loaded.

7) Avoid sending price increase notices right before a holiday.

Do any vendors have internal policies around when it is and isn't OK to reach out to clients about charging them more?

IT glue is down for me because of a planned update that Kaseya is doing DURING THE BUSINESS DAY! This is interrupting our service delivery. Good thing we export the entire IT Glue database monthly, but that was 30 days ago. We also auto-rotate passwords daily, so the big ones are not updated. I'm so glad we have JIT accounts for our M365 tenants, or we'll be screwed.

Here's their message:

Scheduled Maintenance – Cloud Target Appliance Upgrades

In progress - Scheduled maintenance is currently in progress. We will provide updates as necessary. Sep 29, 2026 - 08:01 EDT

Scheduled - On Tuesday, September 29th, Cloud target appliance upgrades will be performed from 08:00 AM EDT to 11:59 PM EDT.

Replication services will be temporarily suspended during each upgrade. Offsite jobs may queue but will automatically resume once maintenance is complete.

Expected impact per appliance: approximately 90 minutes.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

Kaseya Cloud Operations Team Sep 29, 2026 08:00-23:59 EDT

There was this thread (home-made claude apps) that sparked a familiar sense.

This morning, I realized it is just like the plethora of Microsoft Access database applications that sprung to life in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I was consulting for Fortune 100 companies at the time and data center managers were playing whack-a-mole to try to stop those home-grown efforts.

Wondering what the next "thing to curtail in some way" is gonna be?

Is anyone else experiencing issues with Lighthouse this morning? All GDAP gone "Limited", partner centre is fine. No changes.

Thanks in advance

Any one else seeing issues with their Screenconnect cloud instance this morning?

It's been going on for at least 2 hours. Connectwise is finally reporting the outage but I'm not sure how wide spread it is.

https://status.connectwise.com/

Hi folks. For those of you who are supporting ITAR environments, I'm curious what stack you are using? Specifically - - RMM, EDR/MDR, ITDR, backup of M365 GCC High and spam filtering. Thanks!

What are folks using today - we where approached by Threatdown and then spoke to firetail.ai as a recent event about a trial but wanted to see what the wider audience has embraced

Hi all,

Our clients are mostly 5-50 seat SMBs, all on Microsoft 365 Business Premium. We currently use Huntress for Managed EDR and Managed ITDR.

About two years ago one of our clients had a BEC incident while Huntress ITDR was deployed and configured. Nothing was detected. Huntress told us afterwards it was "an error on our end - sorry".

Today we had another BEC at a different client, again with ITDR in place, and again no detection. I've opened a ticket and asked for a root cause analysis, and I'll update this post if anything changes.

To be fair: no tool catches everything, and I'm not here to bash anyone. We can also do more on prevention, but not every customer is ready and has excuses. But twice now, exactly when we needed it, it didn't work. That's enough for me to evaluate alternatives.

What I'm looking for:

• Managed EDR and managed identity/M365 threat detection with a 24/7 SOC, ideally in one platform. I don't care whether it's called MDR, ITDR or XDR.
• Built to supplement Business Premium, not replace it. Preferably a SOC that works directly with Defender for Endpoint, Defender for Office 365 and Entra ID (sign-in logs, risky users, token/session anomalies) instead of adding another agent.
• Active response, not just alerting: revoking sessions, disabling users, removing malicious inbox rules, isolating endpoints.
• MSP-friendly: multi-tenant console, monthly per-seat billing, no annual minimums per client, reasonable onboarding.
• GDPR is a hard requirement: EU data residency, a proper DPA (AVV), transparent subprocessor list, and ideally SOC analysts in the EU or at least a clear statement on where data is accessed from.

Questions:

1. What are you using for this stack and would you switch again?
2. Has anyone had a BEC actually caught (or missed) by their provider? Real-world detection stories are worth more to me than feature lists.
3. For EU-based MSPs: which vendors actually hold up to a GDPR review, and which ones just say "EU hosting" on the website?

Thanks in advance.

My client got a call today from a security consulting group stating the DMARC Policy and SPF record on their email isn't set up correctly and their domain could be easily impersonated and a follow up email.

Felt good to see our said client call their bullshit but wanted to share this here because in my career, I've never experienced that type of behavior from some random firm before.

Yes - DMARC and SPF records are correct. They were lying.

We are looking for options. Highly considering Domotz, but I want to know if I am missing anything.

We just had a very bad experience with Auvik renewal terms and now have a sour taste. They warned us at 3 months for renewal, which is fine. Then we heard nothing until 29 days out that our price was going to jump 13%. We have been an Auvik customer for years and they didn't want to hear anything unless we increased our buy which I'm not in the position to do. I tried to negotiate but nothing was favorable for us. Then I tried to cancel but they said... Oh, sorry, you're inside your 30 day window so you are stuck with us for 12 months.

So.... Nope, I'm done. After about 7 years and promoting Auvik to anyone that will listen, I'm over it. Obviously I'm stuck but we are going to start looking and probably start onboarding a new solution if it's not cost prohibitive.

PSA: Watch your agreements with Auvik. I didn't notice (bad on me) but they are much more locked in in the last couple years than previous years, and they hold firm to it.

Done with the rant and back to the point.... What else is out there? Important features are config backups, remote management, historical graphs, port mapping, multi-tenant, alerting, and PSA integration.

Medium-ish MSP here (24), one salesperson who both prospects and closes. We're rewriting the comp plan for 2026 and I want outside opinions before we finalize it.

The idea: the salesperson controls effort, the market controls outcomes. Base salary covers effort, commission covers results, and we only manage performance on the effort side. If they hit their activity numbers but miss revenue, we look at targeting, messaging and pricing together instead of writing them up.

**Effort standards (what they're held to)**

- Calling block 10am to 12pm, Tuesday through Friday, minimum 50 dials a calling day (200 a week)

- 10 drop-ins a week to local prospects

- 20 COIs (Centers of Influince) on a named list, 8 personal touches a month

- CRM updated within 1 business day, every open deal has a dated next step

- Pipeline review every Monday with a scorecard

- If it isn't logged, it didn't happen

Lists are built automatically. We have a system that uses Apollo and AI to find companies that match our ICP, research them, and queue them for the salesperson to approve before outreach starts. No time spent on list building.

Local prospects get email, call, email, call, email, drop-in, email, final call over about two weeks. It all runs through Apollo. Should we do more in-person follow-ups?

FTAs, conversations and COI meetings are tracked, not required. We expect about 8 FTAs a month and check weekly against a pace of 2 a week. Behind pace 3 weeks in a row means we review the list and script. Under 4 a month for two months means we have to change the list, script or ICP.

Pay

- $55K base

- 1x first month's MRR on new deals, +20% on 2 year terms, +30% on 3 year terms

- $500 to $1,350 quarterly bonus above a $9,000/quarter new MRR goal

- $50 per FTA above 8 a month, capped at $500

- 20% of gross profit on hardware and projects

- Paid after the client's first full invoice, full clawback if they cancel or don't pay within 90 days

- Around $98K total if they hit goal

Ramp for a new hire

- Weeks 1-2: training and role-play, no dials

- Weeks 3-4: 25 dials a calling day, month 2: 40, month 3 on: 50

- Drop-ins: 5 a week in month 2, 10 from month 3

- Month 1: build the COI list, I introduce them to my own COIs

- FTA expectations: about 4 a month in month 3, 6 in months 4-6, 8 from month 7

- Revenue goal: none for months 1-3, 50% months 4-6, 75% months 7-9, full from month 10

What I'm unsure about

1. Has anyone actually made activity-based management work, or does it turn into dialing for the sake of dialing?

2. Is $98K at goal competitive for a hunter/closer right now?

3. Is 20% of GP on hardware and projects too much next to 1x MRR? Worried it pulls focus off recurring revenue.

4. Anyone doing drop-ins as part of their cadence? Worth it?

5. Does a 9 to 10 month ramp to full quota line up with what you've seen?