MSP360 Goes its Own Way

The managed services software maker courts MSPs with $8 million in revenue and under in ways that set it apart from competitors.

Evergreen Services Group (covered elsewhere this week) has no hard and fast rules about who it acquires, but they tend to be larger MSPs. “Our average company when we acquire it is $8 million in revenue and north of a million of EBITDA,” says Ramsey Sahyoun, the company’s co-founder and M&A partner.

One of those numbers looms large at managed services software vendor MSP360 too, as it happens. “Right now, we target MSPs that are around $8 million in revenue and below,” says Brian Helwig, the vendor’s CEO.

Everything MSP360 does is optimized for that ideal buyer, he continues, resulting in a company that zigs where competitors zag in interesting ways. For example, unlike Atera and ConnectWise, among others, Helwig’s team isn’t giving much thought to AI right now, because neither are its partners.

“They’re pretty skeptical if it’s going to work. They’re pretty skeptical if it’s consistent. They’re pretty skeptical whose benefit it’s working for in margin, price, product, [and] service,” Helwig (pictured) says.

MSP360 is also much less interested than Kaseya, say, in building an integrated portfolio of its own solutions. The company specializes in backup, RMM, and remote access. “We’re going to focus on those three things and we’re going to let everybody else come into our ecosystem,” Helwig says. “It’s going to be partner and integrate, partner, integrate, partner, integrate from here on out.”

Backblaze, Deep Instinct, and Wasabi are a few of the company’s top integration partners. Leveraging their solutions rather than building or buying its own is part of what enables MSP360 to charge the low prices that according to Helwig MSPs below $8 million (and below $1 million especially) value way more than AI. The company’s RMM software lists for $59.99 per admin per month, for example, with remote access included at no extra charge. Desktop backup sells for a recently reduced $2.50 per admin per month.

“On top of that, you get a discount depending upon what your volume is,” Helwig says. “You can get it all the way down to almost a dollar and a quarter.”

Prepaying for a year’s worth of any MSP360 solution gets you two months free, but most partners prefer the flexibility of buying without a contract.

“MSPs that are below a million dollars tend to want to stay month to month,” Helwig says.

The larger (by MSP360 standards) partners doing a couple million or more a year now get access to a dedicated technical account manager. “Those ones want to know that when they’re going through a net new customer acquisition, they have the support and help that they need, the expertise behind them, to make the right decisions the first time,” Helwig says.

And yes, Helwig concedes, more expensive solutions have features that MSP360 lacks, but his partners don’t miss them. “If I’m a large enterprise, I probably need them all. If I’m an MSP, I probably only need 50% of them,” he says.

Charging less on more flexible terms for that 50% seems to be working. “We’re north of, I want to say, close to 70% year-over-year growth,” Helwig says.