Every small MSP owner knows this one in their gut. The more your shop grows, the more your tools cost you, before you’ve invoiced a dollar of the new work. Win three clients, hire two techs, and the PSA bill goes up on the 1st, automatically. That’s the per-seat tax, and it’s charged on the exact thing you’re working hardest to build.
The model is the problem, not the vendor
Per-seat, per-tech, per-endpoint pricing isn’t a mistake anyone made. It’s the design. It ties your supplier’s revenue to your headcount, so the one line item that should be the most predictable part of your month scales with the least predictable part of your business.
Then comes the second squeeze, the one you don’t control at all. PSA platforms consolidate. A vendor gets acquired, entry tiers creep up, a feature you relied on moves to a higher plan, an add-on you didn’t ask for lands on the invoice. You pay it, because migrating your whole shop is worse than the hike. That’s a cloud landlord, and the switching cost is the rent.
Flat, whichever way you run it
When we built Opentra for our own MSP, flat pricing came before any feature, and it holds however you deploy:
- Community. Free, self-hosted. Run it on your own box, forever. Your PostgreSQL, your data.
- Pro at $149/mo flat. Every integration, priority support, and unlimited techs and client orgs.
- Opentra Cloud at $249/mo flat. We host it with a 99.9% uptime SLA if you’d rather not run the box yourself.
No per-seat line anywhere. Add the tenth tech or the hundredth client and the number doesn’t move. Your good year stays your good year.
Ownership is the real point
Ask any supplier the question that matters: what happens if you disappear? With Opentra, nothing stops. You own your data and can export it, on any tier. No one can acquire their way into raising your rent or sitting on your book of business. And because we’re PSA-only by design, your monitoring stays yours, so bring the RMM you already trust.
Flat isn’t automatically the cheapest option for a two-person shop on day one, and if you want one vendor running your monitoring and your service desk from their cloud, that’s a fair trade, just not the one we make. But if the software invoice makes you wince every time the team grows, that’s the itch we built Opentra to fix.
See what flat does to your numbers on the pricing calculator, or request early access.