Every MSP wants you locked in. Very few want to tell you why their best reason for a 36-month contract is that it protects them, not you.

I’ve sat on both sides of these conversations for a long time now. I’ve sold three-year deals, I’ve watched operators try to wriggle out of them mid-term when service went sideways, and I’ve sat across the table from finance directors who told me, very politely, that they’d rather chew glass than sign another one. So I want to make the honest case here - for both models - and then tell you what I actually think a fair contract looks like in 2026 if you run restaurants, hotels, or bars.

This isn’t a pitch dressed up as a buyer’s guide. There are operators for whom a long-term contract genuinely makes sense. But the default in this industry is 36 months minimum, and the default is wrong for most hospitality businesses.

The honest case for long-term contracts

Let me start by being fair to my own industry, because there are real reasons MSPs ask for three years and they’re not all about lock-in.

Onboarding a new client properly costs money. We send engineers to every site to audit kit, document network topology, build a CMDB, get monitoring agents deployed, set up backups, integrate the EPOS estate, take over the Microsoft tenancy, train the service desk on your particular quirks. For a ten-site restaurant group that’s easily six to eight weeks of work before we’ve billed a single support hour. If a client churns after twelve months, the MSP loses money on the relationship full stop.

A longer commitment also lets us price more keenly. If I know you’re contracted for three years, I can amortise the onboarding investment, lock in better terms with our own suppliers, and pass some of that saving back. A 12-month deal at the same price point genuinely costs the MSP more to deliver, and an honest provider will tell you so.

And there’s a softer argument about commitment. Three years is long enough for both sides to invest in the relationship properly - to learn each other’s businesses, to roadmap improvements, to make decisions that pay back over eighteen months rather than three. A client who might leave in 90 days never quite gets the same energy from the account team. That’s human nature.

These are all real. I’m not going to dismiss them.

The honest case against

But here’s what the long-term contract also does, and this is the part the salesperson doesn’t volunteer.

It removes your leverage. The day you sign a 36-month deal, your most powerful negotiating lever - the threat of leaving - goes in a drawer for three years. Every conversation about service problems, every push for a credit, every request to add or remove sites happens against the unspoken backdrop that the MSP knows you can’t go anywhere. Even good providers behave slightly differently when they know that.

The relationship goes stale. The first six months of a new MSP relationship are usually excellent. Everyone is leaning in, the engineers are fresh, the account manager is attentive. By month eighteen, your account is one of forty on a list, the original sales engineer has moved on, and your tickets are in a queue with everyone else’s. The contract has another eighteen months to run.

Service complaints get less urgent. I have genuinely heard MSP service managers say, in private, “we don’t need to fix this in a hurry, they’ve got two years left.” Not at CloudMatters, but I’ve heard it. A rolling contract makes that conversation impossible.

Price escalation is harder to resist. Most three-year contracts have an annual RPI or RPI+ uplift clause. By year three, you’re paying noticeably more than year one for the same service, and switching cost feels enormous because you’ve forgotten how the alternative even works. Contract inertia is one of the great profit centres of the MSP industry.

Why hospitality is a particularly bad fit

Hospitality is not a stable industry. You open sites, close sites, refit sites, acquire other operators, sell off non-core brands, change EPOS vendors when the existing one stops keeping up. The CEO comes back from a trip to Lisbon and announces a new concept that needs to launch in eight weeks. Your IT requirements in month thirty look nothing like they did in month one.

A long-term contract does not flex well to any of that. Adding sites is usually fine - that’s more revenue for the MSP. Removing sites is where it gets ugly. Most contracts I’ve reviewed for prospective clients have either a minimum spend commitment, a per-site exit fee, or both. So when you close two underperforming sites, you’re still paying for IT support on them. When you sell a brand to another operator, transferring the contract becomes a months-long negotiation. When you want to swap your EPOS vendor, you discover the integration work isn’t in scope and there’s a change request waiting.

And then there’s the acquisition scenario. You buy a five-site competitor with a different MSP. Now you’ve got two contracts, two service desks, two sets of standards, and probably eighteen months left on each. Untangling that costs real money and real time.

Our hospitality IT support is built around the assumption that operators move fast and the contract should not be the thing slowing them down.

The rolling contract model

A rolling contract is exactly what it sounds like. You commit for an initial minimum term - often 90 days, sometimes a year - and after that the agreement rolls month-to-month or quarter-to-quarter on a notice period. Notice periods of 30 to 90 days are normal. Pricing is subscription-based per site or per user, and either side can walk with appropriate notice.

The argument against, from the MSP side, is the one I made above: it’s harder to amortise onboarding and easier for clients to leave on a whim. Both true. The argument for, from the client side, is that the relationship has to keep earning itself, every quarter, forever. That’s the whole point.

At CloudMatters we run rolling contracts with a 90-day notice period and a service guarantee. If we miss our SLAs in a given quarter you can walk immediately, no notice, no penalty. We do that because we’re confident in our own service, and because we think it’s the right model for the industry we serve. You can see how that translates into our pricing, which is published per site and per user rather than buried in a bespoke proposal.

I won’t pretend it’s the easier commercial model to run. It puts pressure on us every single month. That’s the point.

What a fair contract actually looks like

Whatever model you end up with - rolling, annual, or longer - these are the clauses I’d push hard on before you sign anything.

A clear, unambiguous exit clause. Notice period stated in days, no rolling auto-renewal lock-in, no “the parties shall enter good faith negotiations” language. You should be able to read the exit clause once and know exactly what you have to do to leave.

No penalty for reducing scope. If you close a site, the contract value drops by the cost of that site. Full stop. Minimum commitments and floor pricing are red flags in an industry that closes sites.

Transparent annual price review. Not a unilateral RPI+3% escalator that the supplier triggers by sending you a letter. An actual review with notice, justification, and the right to push back or walk.

Right to audit. You should be entitled to see backup reports, patch compliance, ticket data and SLA performance on demand, not when the MSP feels like sharing it. If they won’t let you audit, ask why.

Data portability on exit. When you leave, you get your data, your documentation, your configurations, your CMDB, your monitoring history, and reasonable handover support to the next provider. In writing, before you sign. This is the one most operators forget, and it’s the one that hurts most when it bites.

The traps to watch for

A few specific things in long-term MSP contracts that I’d flag every time.

Auto-renewal clauses that require 90 or 120 days’ notice to cancel before the end of the term, then roll for another full term if you miss the window. I have seen operators trapped for an extra three years because someone forgot to send a letter in March.

Price escalator clauses tied to RPI plus a margin, with no cap. In a high-inflation year that compounds viciously.

Data hostage situations where the MSP holds your backups, your documentation, or your Microsoft tenancy admin in a way that makes leaving practically impossible even if it’s contractually allowed. Always make sure you hold global admin on your own tenancy, and that backups are exportable.

Scope creep clauses that quietly move things from “included” into “professional services” over time. Read the change control language carefully.

If the contract you’re being offered has any of these, push back. A reasonable provider will negotiate. An unreasonable one is showing you who they are before you’ve even signed.

Where we stand

CloudMatters runs rolling contracts because we believe that’s the fair model for the industry we serve. We’re a London hospitality IT specialist, our team stays put, and we earn the relationship every quarter. You can read more about who we are and how we work if you want the longer version.

The single best thing you can do before signing any IT contract is to take it home, read every clause, and ask what happens if you want to leave in eighteen months. The answer tells you most of what you need to know about the provider.

Coming up for renewal, or about to sign your first deal? Have a look at our hospitality IT support approach, or get in touch and we’ll talk through what a fair contract actually looks like for your business.