The Missing Service Catalog

Ask a founder-led MSP for its service catalog and you get a pause. There is one, in the sense that every client pays for something, and the founder has the number for each of them, and the reason behind it. The dental practice is on a per-seat rate from 2019. The manufacturer pays per device because that is how the old provider billed, and the founder matched it to win the deal. The law firm pays a flat fee that has not moved in four years because the managing partner sends referrals. Each of those was a good decision on the day. Together they are a business with no price, only a history of quotes, and the one person who can produce the next quote is the founder.

How the industry bills

Kaseya asks about a thousand MSPs each year which billing model they use most. In the survey fielded in November 2022, the most common answer was a combination of per-user and per-device pricing, at 26 percent. Per user came next at 21 percent, then a flat monthly fee at 14, per device at 13, a la carte at 12. Named tiers, the Gold, Silver and Bronze packages that every MSP conference talks about, were the main model for 10 percent. A year later the picture held: a combination at 26 percent, tiers at 15, everything else in the low teens. No single way of pricing managed services reaches a third of the industry, and the plurality answer is “it depends.”

MSP Success magazine’s reader survey, published in January 2025, asked about tiers directly. Seventy-one percent of the MSPs that answered offer two or three, and a quarter offer none. Put working operators in a room and the disagreement is out in the open. In a ChannelPro Network roundtable in August 2026, Rayanne Buchianico of ABC Solutions said, “I’m not sure that you need three service levels. Adding complexity means losing time.” Matt Rose of Tech Rage IT, in the same piece: “Per user tends to be what most MSPs go with…but often if you run the numbers on per device, it’s roughly the same.”

None of this troubles a founder. He does not need the industry to agree on a model, because he carries his own in his head and applies it deal by deal, and his version of “it depends” has fifteen years of margin data behind it. It becomes a problem the day someone else has to quote.

What the new seller cannot do

Watch the first sales hire at a founder-led MSP. She finds prospects. She runs a good discovery call. Then the prospect asks what it costs, and she has to ask the founder. Every quote routes through him, so the pipeline moves at the speed of his calendar, and the company is paying a salesperson to be a relay. Six months in, the founder concludes the hire could not close, and he is half right. She could not close because there was nothing she was allowed to close. The price lived in a room she was not in.

The industry’s own surveys have stopped asking. Kaseya’s 2026 State of the MSP, which surveyed 1,061 providers, has no billing-model question at all; it asks about AI and security instead. Whether the thing being sold has a stable price is treated as settled. Inside a founder-led firm it is not settled, and no survey will tell an owner whether it is settled in the one firm that matters.

Write the catalog before you write the job description

The transition step is the service catalog, and it comes before the seller. It has three parts, and a founder who has never written them down can produce all three in a month, because the content is already in his head.

The first is the packages: what is in each one, by name, with the tool stack fixed. Two or three packages is enough. Buchianico is right that a fourth level costs more time than it earns. The second is the prices: the number for each package per user or per device, the minimum, the onboarding fee, and the list of things that cost extra. The unit matters less than people argue about; Rose is right that per user and per device land in the same place. What matters is that the same unit shows up on every quote. The third is the exception rule: who can discount, by how much, and what the client gives in return, a longer term or a larger seat count. The founder’s judgment goes into that rule once, instead of into every deal.

The existing book does not get repriced overnight. Map every account against the catalog. The accounts that fit are done. The accounts that do not fit get a renewal date and a migration price, and that list is the first pipeline the new seller owns, because a conversation with a client who already trusts the company is the easiest sale in the building.

What an owner should ask

At the next operating review, ask for the service catalog. If the answer is a spreadsheet the founder keeps, ask how many of the last twenty quotes were built from it without a change. Then ask the founder to step out, and have someone else price a forty-seat prospect with two offices and a compliance requirement. Count the minutes, and count the questions that have to wait for him to come back. That is the measure of how much of the sales motion he still is.

A founder who priced by feel for fifteen years built the book you bought, and his feel was right more often than not. The first hire will not have it, and the second hire will have it less. The service catalog is where his judgment gets written down, so the company keeps selling at his prices with him out of the room.