OpenMSP And Startup Flamingo To Offer MSPs Open-Source Alternatives To Expensive Tools

‘If you want to explore your options, go to OpenMSP. Pick a commercial product, and you will automatically get all the alternatives. Also, you can build a custom report with Anthropic Claude, and we’ll build it for you with recommendations on how to do it in a strategic manner in three to six months, and which products you need to change first, second, third, etc.,’ says Michael Assraf, Flamingo CEO and founder.

When Michael Assraf previously worked with MSPs in the cybersecurity space, he found that MSPs struggled with margins and labor costs, and thought there had to be a better way for them to run their businesses.

That way was for MSPs to take advantage of open-source alternatives to many if not most of the tools in their stack. However, Assraf told CRN, the difficulty is that many MSPs are not used to working with open-source tools, many of which can be difficult to deploy.

For that reason, he founded Miami Beach, Fla.-based Flamingo as well as the OpenMSP project. And while Flamingo still remains in stealth mode, the OpenMSP project is ready for MSPs to use.

“Flamingo is tackling two areas,” he said. “First, how do we fix the margin problem? When it comes to vendor payouts, we use open source. Second, how do we fix the labor problem? We utilize AI on top of open-source software in a very integrated manner that not only decreases the amount MSPs spend on vendor payouts, but also the amount they pay for labor, and overall bring those companies to almost becoming software companies with 80 [percent] or 90 percent gross margins.”

While Flamingo, when it comes to market later this year, will add services such as billing to MSPs’ open-source tools, OpenMSP is now ready to help MSPs find and deploy those tools, even if those MSPs lack open-source experience, Assraf said.

“If you want to explore your options, go to OpenMSP,” he said. “Pick a commercial product, and you will automatically get all the alternatives. Also, you can build a custom report with Anthropic Claude, and we’ll build it for you with recommendations on how to do it in a strategic manner in three to six months, and which products you need to change first, second, third, etc.”

There is a lot more going on with OpenMSP in terms of helping MSPs take advantage of open-source tools to increase their margins and reduce their labor costs. For details, read CRN’s entire conversation with Assraf, which has been lightly edited for clarity.

You’re launching a brand-new company out of stealth, right?

Not yet. We’re launching the community before the company comes out of stealth. We’re gonna come out of stealth once the product’s ready. The community is going to support the product, but it’s out of stealth.

Talk about the new company, Flamingo.

Flamingo is a company that will change the way MSPs operate. Prior to this company, I had another company in the cybersecurity space building vulnerability remediation tools, and the majority of customers that we had in the U.S. were MSPs. I saw two major areas that the MSPs are struggling with. First, I think their top priority is margins, but their margins are just too small. The talk about 10 [percent] to 15 percent net margins, while between 25 [percent] to 30 percent goes to vendor payouts. That’s why we see already a shift to open source. Another 20 [percent] to 30 percent is going to labor, or, you know, tier one, tier two. When I moved on from my previous company, I saw some things happening with the MSPs that I was working with. One of the major things was, I saw them shifting to open source. So if an MSP was using a commercial SSO (single sign-on), it was switched to something like Authentic, which would increase the margins for that specific product on your P&L (profit and loss statement) to almost 100 percent.

Flamingo is tackling two areas. First, how do we fix the margin problem? When it comes to vendor payouts, we use open source. Second, how do we fix the labor problem? We utilize AI on top of open-source software in a very integrated manner that not only decreases the amount MSPs spend on vendor payouts, but also the amount they pay for labor, and overall bring those companies to almost becoming software companies with 80 [percent] or 90 percent gross margins.

Are there enough open-source technologies for MSPs to make a dent in their business costs?

That’s exactly what OpenMSP is here for, to show that it is possible. I will put it this way. I’m not trying to prove to anyone that open source can change everything. Some stuff doesn’t even need to change because they’re too complex or they’re too cheap to replace. It all comes to a cost perspective. I took six months to conduct pretty extensive research with MSPs to map out 20 to 50 products they utilize on their per-seat model. Then I took the pricing for those and mapped out what are the most costly ones and what are the most mature open-source tools that can replace them head-to-head. If you ask me can a Fortune 500 company replace Okta with an open-source alternative to Okta, I’d say, probably not. [But] I think it’s definitely applicable, definitely for the five to 10 most costly, most used products of MSPs. The shorter answer: OpenMSP is precisely for this purpose. If you want to explore your options, go to OpenMSP. Pick a commercial product, and you will automatically get all the alternatives. Also, you can build a custom report with Anthropic Claude, and we’ll build it for you with recommendations on how to do it in a strategic manner in three to six months, and which products you need to change first, second, third, etc.

You mentioned 10 most common applications that could be replaced by open source. What are those applications?

RMM (remote monitoring and management) is the baseline for everything, even if it’s not the most costly one, this is something that you just need to have. That’s one example. SSO is also on the top five. We’ll talk about backup and disaster recovery, another big one. EDR (endpoint detection and response) and EPP (endpoint protection platform). The idea of OpenMSP is to provide recommendations for open-source alternatives, but the actual product of Flamingo will be to actually bundle all of these tools together into a single product that is fully integrated.

So you first are telling MSPs they can replace some of their applications with open source on their own, but eventually Flamingo will provide an MSP platform that already integrates these open-source alternatives?

Exactly, with unified log analysis, API automation, AI, everything is bundled together. And the big the big thing is that it can be self-hosted, so if the MSP wants to deploy it on its own, it can definitely go ahead and do that. If he wants a SaaS offering, we can provide it at a price that will be significantly lower than any other bundle that it might choose, whether it’s using Kaseya, whatever combination of vendors. Easy.

Will Flamingo then be competing with companies like Kaseya, ConnectWise, or Pax8?

Pax8 is a bit of an interesting story, but I would say of course for Kaseya and ConnectWise.

Why is Pax8 such an interesting story?

Because it’s a very, very cool idea. I wouldn’t necessarily call it an MSP tool. It’s like purchased software that helps MSPs, but Pax8 doesn’t provide actual services. We have plans to create services like invoicing, billing and all this type of stuff for the MSPs, and we expect the only vendor they will buy the software from is us.

How do MSPs take advantage of OpenMSP?

The platform has a few pillars. The first pillar is the data aspect. Based on the research I did, we mapped a lot of the MSP tools into this platform. We have around 155 vendors, broken down by categories. If you check each category, you would see a combo of commercial and open-source tools. We prioritized open source. Our sorting algorithm open-source tools maps out how active those tools are on GitHub. We take things like stars, forks, commits, and then we calculate them into a unified score. That’s one component. The other aspect is the community aspect, specifically for MSPs. We are scraping a few subreddits that MSPs spend time in such as r/SmallMSP. We check how much this product is being discussed on those channels, and we combine it with the uploads and downloads in the community, and this gives us understanding of, like, so you were using [Microsoft] Intune MDM, and you looking to switch to an open source, what would be the best option for you? Because if this product is being discussed, it’s being actively contributed on GitHub, that’s probably going to be a good option. Let’s say that you’re already using Intune. You can [find] things like explainers and videos and photos, and pro and con comparisons. And this is kind of the more interesting part. We automatically map out the category for Intune, and then we tell you, Okay, you can probably switch to something like MicroMDM. Some of the open-source tools also provide the SaaS offerings, and you can buy that. …

First you upload your MSP details, the name, revenue, and number of seats, etc., then choose your commercial or maybe some of your existing infrastructure is already open source. You upload everything, and then you get a screen which summarizes everything. Then you can see exactly the breakdown of all of your spend on the commercial stack and which open-source alternatives you can use. It will also show you head-to-head comparisons between the commercial product and the open source, and strategic recommendations. It gives you a breakdown of the steps and the strategic recommendations on how to implement that. This is all being done with Claude. And it’s also going to show how our OpenFrame platform can accelerate that transformation whether you want to go with us as a SaaS product or if you want to self-host.

So MSPs can now join the community, correct? When will Flamingo be open for business?

Q4. As the product is ready, we will immediately launch both SaaS and self-hosted versions. Like Flamingo itself is an open-source company, OpenFrame will be open source as well.

How does Flamingo make money then?

We will provide it as a SaaS product. The second part, which is the more interesting part, we’re gonna build our own agentic framework on top of those tools. We talked about the software part and the vendor part. There is another component to it, which is how can we reduce labor costs? And that part is an agentic AI framework on top of the regular OpenFrame. This is something we are going to charge for. Plus we are building our own LLM. Obviously, not from scratch, but we are utilizing existing open-source models. But it’s not going to be just a connector or wrapper to OpenAI or Anthropic. It’s gonna be our own AI.

Do you think MSPs in general are ready for open source?

That’s the million-dollar question, right? I see switching to open source mostly the younger, newer MSPs. I didn’t really see it happening with the more traditional MSPs. I think it’s becoming easier to open source. We also partner with a [fully managed open-source DevOps] company called Elestio for some of the tools we have in OpenMSP. We also have a ‘deploy now’ button for one-click deployment. That’s self-hosted, meaning that they just deploy it for you and keep monitoring and things like that. But it’s very, very simple. I think there are a few elements that are kind of tough for MSPs to adopt. Open source doesn’t always have the support they need. It’s hard to deploy, it’s hard to monitor, etc., which is why we’re building OpenFrame.

Elestio is simply a directory of many, many, many open-source projects. Let’s say that you don’t want to start handling command lines or going to GitHub and all this type of stuff, you just go to Elestio, search for the open-source tool, and they will deploy it for you. Just tell them where you want it to be deployed. Or they also have their own cloud and will deploy it there if you don’t have your own cloud. It’s a paid-for service, but it’s super cheap. You pay a small markup on top of the hosting, and that’s it.