When a Vendor Fails, Your Contract Shouldn’t

Most small businesses depend on outside vendors: cloud providers, payment processors, CRM platforms, and remote tools. But what happens when a vendor goes down, gets breached, or hikes prices without notice?

If your contracts don’t handle that risk, you could be stuck with angry clients, financial loss, or legal exposure for something you didn’t cause.

Vendor Risk Is Real

  • Your cloud hosting partner has an outage.
  • A security vendor gets breached.
  • A software provider sunsets a tool you rely on.

In all these cases, your client might blame you. Unless your contract says otherwise.

How Monjur Handles Vendor Risk

Our contract templates include a dedicated Schedule of Third-Party Services. It does two critical things:

  1. Disclaims Liability: You’re not responsible for the performance or failures of vendors listed in the schedule. If a breach or outage happens, your agreement protects you.
  2. Documents Client Approval of Vendor Terms: The schedule confirms that your customer has reviewed and accepted the terms and conditions of each listed third-party service. This helps shift responsibility and reduces dispute risk.

If a third-party service increases rates, you can pass that cost along, with notice. If a client cancels, you can recover prepaid or committed vendor fees.

Why You Need This

Without clear language, you could:

  • Eat the cost of a vendor failure
  • Be blamed for downtime you couldn’t prevent
  • Lose margin on tools you were reselling or managing.

How Monjur Helps

Monjur Pilot delivers:

  • A ready-to-use Schedule of Third-Party Services
  • Attorney-reviewed disclaimers and passthrough clauses
  • AI Legal Assistants that help you explain these protections to clients

You can add or update vendors anytime, and sync those changes into your active quotes and contracts.

Found this useful?
Share it with another MSP founder.
Rob Scott
About the author

Rob Scott

CEO & Co-Founder, Attorney

Attorney with 25+ years of MSP legal experience. Co-Founder of Scott & Scott, LLP and Monjur. Has overseen contracting for 1,000+ MSPs.

Rob Scott is an attorney with more than 25 years of experience in MSP and technology law, and the co-founder of both Scott & Scott, LLP and Monjur. He has overseen customer contracting for more than 1,000 managed service providers and built Monjur to bring attorney-supervised contract intelligence to the MSP industry.

Licensed in Texas since 1999, Rob earned his J.D. from the Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University and his B.A. in Economics and Philosophy from Austin College. His practice focuses on software licensing, software audit defense, data privacy, and vendor risk, representing MSPs and enterprise clients in transactions and disputes with major software publishers.

Stop worrying about contracts

Attorney-supervised contract intelligence for MSPs.

We write and update your client contracts, and protect your business, so you don't have to.

See Monjur Pilot in your own MSA.

No slide deck. We'll pull up your actual contract and show you what Pilot would flag.

Schedule 20-minute demo →
1,000+ MSPs · 25+ years of MSP legal