Flamingo MSP

Not all offices are created equal.

The Flamingo HQ is in Gather, where every room designed by the teammate who lives in it.

This is who's building your next-gen MSP software btw.

Multiple Microsoft Azure sales teams missed their AI growth targets last fiscal year.

Their response? Slash Copilot pricing 30% and push promotional discounts through March.

When the AI leader starts slashing prices and pushing promos, that tells you something.

The AI adoption story you're hearing from vendors doesn't match what's actually happening in the market. MSPs know this already. Only 41.5% have AI integration above 25%, despite 90% saying AI is vital to their growth strategy.

Why the gap? 93% cite data quality issues. 49% say customer apathy. 38% point to product complexity. 36% don't have adequately trained staff.

Microsoft's response? Make it cheaper and bundle it harder. Three new Copilot bundles with Business Basic, Standard, and Premium. Push it through CSP partners with time-limited promos. Turn sales pressure up.

But here's what vendors won't tell you: cheaper pricing doesn't fix adoption barriers. If your clients don't understand the value, a 35% discount won't change that. If your team isn't trained, promotional pricing just means you're selling something you can't support.

The real issue isn't price. It's that AI tools were sold as magic solutions before the infrastructure, training, and use cases were ready.

Microsoft missing sales targets proves what MSPs have been experiencing: clients aren't buying AI at the pace vendors projected. The hype cycle hit reality.

So what do you do? Don't chase vendor quotas and promotional deadlines. Focus on actual client problems that AI can solve. Start small. Train your team first. Build use cases that deliver measurable value.

Because when the discount period ends and Microsoft adjusts pricing again, which they will, you'll be stuck supporting tools your clients barely use and you barely understand.

The AI opportunity is real. But the vendor-driven adoption timeline was never realistic.

3 years ago, suggesting open-source MSP tools would've sounded crazy.

Today? The conversation has completely shifted.

Because the tools aren't experimental anymore. They're production-ready. Running real MSP operations at real scale.

TacticalRMM has 3.9k GitHub stars and an active community. Wazuh rivals commercial SIEM/XDR platforms with MSSP partnership programs. Zabbix runs in 300,000+ deployments globally.

ITFlow, built by MSPs frustrated with proprietary PSA limitations, delivers ticketing, billing, CRM, and AI support without the vendor extraction.

These aren't hobby projects. And the numbers prove it.

SecureTokens switched to TacticalRMM and Wazuh. Result: 27% cost reduction in licensing.
A federal MSP using Zabbix got enterprise-grade monitoring across multiple data centers with "essentially no software costs."

At 20-35% of revenue being consumed by vendor licensing, that's 5-9% of total revenue freed back to your bottom line. That's the difference between 12% margins and 19% margins.

The maturity inflection point arrived in 2024. The tooling exists. The communities are active. The support infrastructure is there.

The MSPs moving first will build expertise when switching costs are lowest. By the time the industry catches up, they'll own the competitive advantage.

Everyone in the MSP space is saying the same thing: consolidate your vendors.

It sounds smart, but it's basically trading one problem for a much bigger one.

In theory, it makes sense: Fewer platforms. Unified dashboards. Single contract.

You reduce from 20 vendor relationships to 3-5. But now you've handed massive leverage to the vendors you keep.

Your switching costs explode. Your negotiating power vanishes. They know you can't leave.

Look at what happened with Kaseya and Datto.

MSPs consolidated their entire stack to Datto. Seemed smart at the time. Then Kaseya acquired them for $6.2 billion and suddenly those MSPs had zero ability to negotiate or exit.

IT Glue started declining. RocketCyber stagnated. Support quality fell off a cliff.

That's what consolidation actually means: you're not reducing complexity. You're increasing dependency on vendors who control bigger pieces of your business.

The real answer isn't fewer proprietary platforms. It's independence through architecture that doesn't depend on any single vendor's priorities, pricing decisions, or roadmap.

Independence. That's the move.

60% of MSP technicians are burnt out. Real burnout.

Not "work is tough" burnout. The kind where:

• 44% can't keep up with their daily tickets
• 64% work holidays and weekends
• 43% regularly pull all-nighters
• 39% have had vacations destroyed by alerts

The culprit? A toolstack where nothing talks to anything else.

Your team logs into Sentinel One for endpoint detection, then switches to Crowdstrike for threat intelligence, then to Wazuh for SIEM, then back to ConnectWise for ticketing.

Each platform is a silo. Different data. Different formats. Different alert thresholds. A breach in one system doesn't automatically trigger a response in another. They're all screaming into the void.

Alert fatigue is real: 63% of security teams experience it. Critical threats get buried in noise. Context switching kills productivity. When your team can't see the full picture without manually toggling between disconnected dashboards, burnout isn't a bug. It's inevitable.

The crazy part: 94% of IT professionals want to delegate routine tasks to automation. But proprietary tools can only automate what vendors decide matters.

Your team isn't burnt out because they're weak. They're burnt out because the architecture you're forcing them to work within is fundamentally broken.

Ransomware groups aren't targeting MSP clients anymore.

They're targeting the MSPs themselves.

RMM gives you privileged access to hundreds or thousands of endpoints. One login, manage everything. That's the value proposition.

It's also why MSPs are the highest-value target for ransomware operations.
Compromise one MSP, get hundreds of victims. It's multiplication. It's efficient.

Attacks targeting MSP infrastructure increased 70% in 2025 according to CrowdStrike.

Here's how it actually plays out:

DragonForce exploited SimpleHelp RMM in May. Compromised one MSP. Used their legitimate RMM access to deploy ransomware across multiple customer endpoints simultaneously.

Qilin hit ScreenConnect in January. Bypassed MFA with phishing. Gained super admin access. Pushed malicious instances to multiple customers. Different ransomware password for each client.

SafePay attacked Ingram Micro in July. Six-day global supply chain disruption.

Thousands of MSPs affected worldwide.

The pattern is clear. RMM tools are designed for remote access and control. That makes them perfect attack vectors.

And when vulnerabilities get discovered, you're dependent on vendor patching timelines. SimpleHelp had three critical CVEs in May. MSPs running it had to wait. No control over the schedule.

Verizon's 2025 report confirms it: 44% of breaches involve ransomware (up from 32%), 30% involve third parties (doubled from 15%).

You're not just a service provider. You're an attack vector.

Security isn't just about endpoint protection. It's about your infrastructure. Your tools. Your access. Your dependencies.

You can't stop using RMM. But you can control what you use, how it's secured, and whether you're sitting around waiting for vendors to patch critical vulnerabilities.

Because ransomware groups already figured out the math. One MSP breach equals hundreds of victims.

They're coming for your tools.

28% of MSPs aren't profitable.

The ones that are? 8-9% EBITDA on average. Let me show you why.

Vendor licensing: 20-35% of revenue. Gone. Off the top.

Technician labor: another 20-30% of revenue.

So you're already at 40-65% of revenue spoken for.

What's left? For most MSPs, not much.

The top performers hit 35%+ net margins. But they're the exception. They've figured out lean operations, automation, and premium positioning. Most MSPs are running 8-12% margins and wondering why they can't invest in growth.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: you can't scale on single-digit margins. You can't weather economic downturns. You can't attract top talent. You can't invest in the tools and training that would actually improve efficiency.

You're stuck.

And while you're stuck, vendors keep raising prices. Microsoft just implemented a 5% increase on annual commitments. Team Phone went from $8 to $10 per user. These aren't small numbers when you multiply them across hundreds of seats.

Every price increase from vendors comes straight out of your already-thin margins. You can try to pass it to clients, but there's a limit to how many price increases clients will accept before they shop around.

So what's the answer?

Some MSPs are getting acquired. 100+ deals in Q1 2025 alone, over $1 billion in value. Private equity is paying 20x EBITDA for premium assets. That works if you've built something scalable and profitable.

Others are exploring open source. Swapping ConnectWise for TacticalRMM. Ditching expensive security platforms for Wazuh. Calculating $35K-$160K in savings over three years.

Still others are doubling down on security and compliance services - the high-margin work that actually moves the needle on profitability.

But here's what won't work: doing the same thing and hoping vendor costs magically decrease. They won't. The 28% of MSPs that aren't profitable? That number gets worse if nothing changes.

The math has to work. If it doesn't work now, figure out what needs to change.
Because vendor sympathy isn't coming.

Kaseya just announced they're killing high watermark pricing.

This isn't vendor generosity. This is vendors realizing they pushed too far.

After years of MSPs complaining about being locked into peak pricing that never goes down, Kaseya is eliminating it completely. Datto RMM, SaaS Protection, and Autotask by December 2025. The rest of their tools by June 2026.

High watermark billing was the perfect example of vendor economics gone wrong. You hit 100 clients once, drop to 80, but keep paying for 100 forever. MSPs hated it.
Complained about it for years. And vendors kept doing it anyway because they could.

Microsoft made changes too. Reintroduced Teams bundling, raised prices 5% on annual commitments, bumped Teams Phone from $8 to $10 per user. First increase since 2017.

Here's what's actually happening: vendors are feeling pressure. Real pressure.
1,000+ MSPs joined our waitlist in weeks. TacticalRMM has 5,779 active users. The r/msp Reddit community (193,000 members) is openly discussing alternatives. MSPs are calculating how much they'd save ditching commercial tools.

The movement toward open source isn't hypothetical anymore. It's happening. And vendors know it.

When Kaseya eliminates a revenue model they've defended for years, that tells you everything.

They're watching MSPs run the math on alternatives. They're seeing the community momentum. They're making moves to keep people from leaving.

This is just the beginning. Vendor pricing models that made sense when there were no alternatives don't work when MSPs have options. And MSPs have options now.

The companies that adapt will survive. The ones that don't will watch their customers walk.

The power dynamic is shifting.

It’s about damn time.

A couple weeks ago, 70+ MSPs showed up to our first OpenFrame webinar.

54 stayed until the very end. For a 90-minute product demo, that's unheard of.

That kind of retention tells you everything you need to know about where this industry is heading.

We've been hearing the same thing for months now. MSPs are done with vendor lock-in. Done with price increases that eat into already thin margins. Done with being told to just accept it.

The numbers back this up. Our waitlist just crossed 1,000 MSPs. Our Slack community has over 200 members actively sharing knowledge and solutions. And right now, 50 MSPs are testing our beta in production environments.

But here's what really struck me during the webinar: the questions weren't "if" - they were "how fast can we get access?"

MSPs asked about data sovereignty, AI security guardrails, self-hosting options, and roadmap priorities.

Real technical questions from people who've done their homework and are ready to make a move.

This isn't skepticism anymore. This is readiness.

The MSP industry is at an inflection point. The old playbook of accepting vendor price hikes and squeezing margins isn't working. PE consolidation is forcing the issue. Tool sprawl is killing efficiency. And MSPs are looking for a real alternative.

What we're seeing isn't just interest in a new product. It's a movement toward independence. Toward community-driven solutions. Toward MSPs taking back control of their stack and their economics.

TacticalRMM proved it's possible with 5,779 active MSPs. Wazuh showed enterprise-grade open source works at scale. Fortune 500 companies are embracing these tools.

Now MSPs are saying: we're ready too. After all, these aren't just people evaluating software. This is an industry building its own future.

This is just the beginning. The movement is real, it's growing, and MSPs are leading it.

If you missed the webinar and want to be part of what's coming next, join the waitlist or hit me up directly. We're launching in waves, but we're moving fast.

The industry is ready for this transformation. We're watching it happen in real time 🦩