Kaseya: MSPs Up Their Rates

It's the start of a new year; it must be time for MSP resource reports. This week, two MSP tools vendors released reports designed to help MSPs, both their current partners and, of course, other MSPs that they hope to attract to their platforms.

Kaseya issued its sixth annual MSP pricing survey, a data-rich, 21-page resource for any MSP wrestling with finding the right way to price their services.

This time Kaseya got fourth-quarter 2016 responses from 920 MSPs, more than twice as many respondents as last year. They came in from 50 countries, and some of the queries are broken out across three broad regions -- North America, EMEA and Asia-Pac -- making it possible to do some very rough apples-to-apples comparisons by geography.

Kaseya highlighted overall growth across the market. The company says 26 percent of respondents reported their average monthly recurring revenue (MRR) growth over the last three years is more than 15 percent. That's up a few points from the 23 percent who reported growth at that level last year.

Getting down to brass tacks on pricing, the largest group of respondents (39 percent) picked "up to $125" for their average charge for ongoing server support and maintenance per month per device. The average size of monthly managed services contracts was going up. In 2015, the most common range was the $1,001-$2,500 -- selected by 35 percent of respondents. That's still the most popular in 2016, with 37 percent of respondents picking that range.

But the lower range of up to $1,000 dropped in 2016 from 34 percent to 23 percent, meaning way more respondents had raised their rates. One big gainer was the $2,501-$5,000 range, which went from 19 percent of respondents to 22 percent of respondents.

The top 10 services offered by the highest-growth partners were (in descending order) backup and recovery (either cloud or onsite), server support, network and connectivity support, desktop support, service desk, desktop security, remote monitoring, cloud services (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS), hosting services on MSP-owned equipment, and enhanced network performance monitoring.

Although one piece of advice that regularly comes to MSPs is to not spread yourself too thin, Kaseya reported that the highest-growth MSPs were adding complexity -- adding services, tiers and more to their practices.

The full report is available here.

Also this week, Continuum released "Scaling for Success: The MSP Guide to Operational Efficiency." Partly a pitch for the Continuum platform, the 27-page guide also includes recommendations and organizational charts for re-orienting an MSP practice around an outsourced network operations center. The Continuum guide is here.

Posted by Scott Bekker on January 11, 2017