Before You Sign with an MSP: 10 Questions That Save You From a Bad Contract

You've gathered three quotes. They all look reasonable. The monthly numbers are within a few hundred dollars of each other. The pitches all sound competent. And you're about to commit to a 36-month contract that's harder to exit than your lease.

Here's the part nobody tells you. Most MSP contracts are written by the MSP. They include exactly the language that protects the MSP and exactly the language that constrains you. Some of that is fair. Some of it is the line between a partner and a trap. Ten questions surface the difference before you sign.

This is the checklist we'd send a friend in the contracting business who asked us to look over a competing proposal. Most of these questions cost you nothing. The MSP either has a good answer or they don't.

1. What's your average response time during business hours, and will you put it in the contract?

If the answer is "best efforts" or "reasonable response time" or "industry standard," you have nothing. Those phrases create no legal obligation and no measurable commitment. A real SLA reads like this. Critical (system down, can't work): 15-minute response, 4-hour target resolution. High (degraded but functional): 1-hour response, 8-hour target. Standard requests: same-business-day response. Get the numbers in the contract, not the marketing deck. Ask what the remedy is if they miss. "We'll do our best" is not a remedy.

2. Who picks up at 2pm Tuesday, and who picks up at 11pm Saturday?

The business-hours SLA hides a different reality after dinner. Most small managed IT shops have one or two on-call technicians overnight. That's fine for normal SMB operations. If you run jobsites or weekend project work, dig in. "15 minutes to respond" with a single tech on call after 6pm means they're sleeping through the page half the time. Ask how many techs cover off-hours, what the realistic answer time is, and whether after-hours rolls into the monthly or hits you with an emergency surcharge. Construction firms in Pueblo and Colorado Springs run Saturday work routinely. The MSP should know that going in.

3. What happens to my data if I leave?

This is the question that exposes whether you're talking to a partner or a hostage-taker. The healthy answer: return of all data and credentials within 5 business days of termination, deletion of all copies within 30 days with written certification, and continued access to your own cloud environments throughout the transition. Anything less than that and your tax records, your project files, your QuickBooks history live on their servers indefinitely after the relationship ends. Some contracts give the MSP exclusive ownership of network diagrams, automation scripts, and configurations they built for you. That's also a no. The documentation of YOUR network is YOURS.

4. How do you handle our network during a bid week?

This is the one that separates construction-savvy MSPs from generalists. If your firm runs Procore or Buildertrend or Sage 300, downtime during a major bid window is a deal-killer. An estimator who can't open a takeoff because the file server is rebooting just lost you the bid. Ask the MSP what their plan is for bid weeks. Do they put your account on incident-priority during those windows? Do they delay non-emergency maintenance? Do they pre-stage redundancy? If they don't know what a bid window is, that's the answer. Either they learn fast or you keep looking.

5. Show me a sample monthly report. What will I see?

Talk is cheap. Reports show what they actually track. A real monthly report includes ticket volume opened and closed, response-time hit rate against SLA, top recurring issues by user or system, hardware health summary, and backup status with successful-recovery test dates. If the report is a single page that says "everything looks good," they don't have the data. If the report is fifty pages of meaningless graphs, they're hiding behind volume. Ask to see one from a real client (with redactions). The good ones will show you. The ones who can't are improvising.

6. What's NOT included in the monthly fee?

This is where the margin lives. Common ambushes. New-employee onboarding ($150 to $300 per setup, billed per incident). Microsoft 365 license adjustments (per-incident project rate). After-hours non-emergency work (1.5x rate, sometimes 2x). Printer or scanner setup (case-by-case). Office moves (project quote). VoIP changes (per-extension fee). You don't need every one of these bundled into the monthly. You need to know which are out-of-scope before you sign so you can budget for them or negotiate them in. Get the exclusions written into the contract, not described verbally.

7. Do you mark up hardware and licenses, and by how much?

This is industry-standard practice, but the answer varies wildly. Some MSPs add 15 to 25 percent on top of their cost. Some hide the markup inside the monthly fee. Some itemize and disclose. Some don't mark up at all and bill procurement as a flat percentage of the project. Whatever the answer, you want to know it. A 20 percent markup on a $10,000 firewall is $2,000 you didn't see coming. None of that is wrong if it's disclosed. All of it is wrong if it's not.

8. Who owns the firewall and switches, and do they keep working if I leave?

This is the licensed-gear trap and it's the one that surprises people the most. Cisco Meraki gear (and similar enterprise WiFi platforms) requires annual licensing that runs 25 to 35 percent of the original hardware cost every single year. When the license expires, the hardware stops passing traffic. So if your MSP installs $30,000 of Meraki gear, you're committing to $7,500-plus per year for the life of that hardware just to keep it powered on. Leave the MSP, and either you keep paying that license or your network goes dark until you replace everything.

UniFi gear keeps working when the relationship ends. Licensed platforms turn into doorstops the day the renewal lapses. That's the difference between an MSP you can leave and one that owns you through the hardware.

We use UniFi because we believe you should own what you paid for. Ask any MSP what platform they install, whether it's license-based or one-time, and what happens to that hardware if you cancel. Get the answer in writing. If the MSP gets defensive about this question, you have your answer.

9. Can I talk to two clients about their LAST bad issue?

Anyone can hand you references from satisfied current clients. They picked the names. They prepped the calls. The signal is in how the MSP handles bad days, not good ones. So change the question. Don't ask the reference "are you happy." Ask "tell me about the last time something broke. How did GTZ (or whoever) respond, and how long did it take to resolve?" The references will tell you the truth about what response time really looks like, what after-hours coverage really feels like, and whether the MSP shows up under pressure or just sends a ticket-acknowledgment auto-reply.

10. What's your minimum contract length, and what's the early-termination clause?

The trap to watch for: 36-month auto-renewing terms with 90-day notice windows. Miss the notice by one day and you're locked in for another 36 months at whatever rate they decide. Some contracts also include CPI-plus-5-percent annual price increases that compound to 20 or 30 percent over the term with no opt-out. What to demand. A 12-month maximum initial term. A 30-day notice to opt out at renewal. A performance-exit right that lets you leave without penalty if they miss SLA for two consecutive months. A capped annual increase if any. If the MSP refuses any of these, that's a signal about how confident they are in their own service.

One more thing the questions don't cover

The best signal isn't in any single answer. It's in how the MSP behaves during the evaluation itself. Did they show up on time to the discovery call? Did they ask good questions about your business, or did they pitch their tier-and-feature deck? Did they push back on something you said was important, or did they agree with everything and try to close? The MSP who challenges your assumptions before the contract is the one who'll challenge them after, when it matters. The one who says yes to everything is the one who'll surprise you at renewal.

Spend the 30 minutes. Send the questions. The MSPs who have good answers will get back to you with substance. The ones who have bad answers will get back to you with marketing copy. That's all the signal you need.