Why we built ClarityCalc

We ran an MSP for years. Like most MSPs, we were focused on growth and operational maturity… getting our legacy customers onto real contracts, untangling years of “what did we sell this person?”, curating a tool stack we were genuinely proud of.

But the world the tool stack served was changing.

A work computer became a work computer plus a home laptop plus a smartphone plus a tablet. The blast radius expanded from “the office network” to wherever your users happened to open their laptops. The threat surface expanded. Compliance frameworks multiplied. The SaaS market got more sophisticated, with license minimums, package deals, tiered pricing, vendor consolidation plays.

Each of those shifts made our service offering more complex. None of them changed the way we priced.

The first version of ClarityCalc was, unsurprisingly, a spreadsheet. We were trying to do something that sounded simple: calculate a fair annual increase across our client base.

We had over 50 clients. Hundreds of vendor-and-product combinations between them. Years of legacy agreements where the original pricing logic was preserved only in the heads of whoever happened to quote it. Some clients had old prices that no longer covered our costs. Some had services they weren't actually using. Some had us delivering things that weren't on any contract.

What started as something we thought would be simple rapidly got muddier and muddier. Tool costs per client. Labor costs per service. Margin per agreement. Each cell we filled in raised three more questions.

Iteration after iteration of those spreadsheets planted the seed. A spreadsheet wasn't the right shape for this. Environments are too dynamic. Vendor prices change. Client headcounts change. A spreadsheet captures a moment; what we needed was a system.

We wanted a tool the owner could use, the sales person could use, the project team could use. A single source of truth that cut through confusion and made everything clear to everyone at the MSP.

By the time we made the decision to build, we'd already solved the problem on paper. The math, the data model, the relationships between products and services and clients and seats… all of it had been hammered into shape by years of trying to make spreadsheets do the work. The features were decided before we ever opened an IDE.

We sold the MSP and pivoted into consulting while ClarityCalc was being built. That move, and the peer groups we participated in along the way, confirmed something we suspected: the problem wasn't just ours. It was the industry's.

Almost every MSP we've talked to has built their own version of this. Some are sophisticated. Most are based on vibes and hope and a lot of manual effort. None of them survive the next vendor price change without significant rework.

There's no good reason every MSP should have to solve this independently.

ClarityCalc is built around a few things we promised ourselves we wouldn't compromise on, because we lived the alternative:

Pricing should be transparent.No “contact us for a quote.” No hidden tiers. The free tier is genuinely free, with no time limit and no credit card.

Commitments should be earned.No annual lock-in. If ClarityCalc isn't paying for itself in the time you've used it, you should be able to walk away.

The tools in your portfolio should earn their place. That's how we evaluate every vendor in our own stack. It's how we want our customers to evaluate us.

We built the tool we wished existed when we were running an MSP. If you're an MSP owner trying to figure out where your margins actually live, we hope it earns its place in yours.