Voccola Apologizes for Kaseya Billing Issues, Promises 'Kickass' New System

KASEYA DATTOCON 2023 — Kaseya CEO Fred Voccola (pictured above on stage) used the first few minutes of his keynote at DattoCon 2023 in Miami to apologize to MSPs for the widespread billing issues that have plagued the company since buying Datto 15 months ago. He promised the company will continue fixing the problems and deliver a new, better billing experience by the first of the year.

“We made mistakes,” Voccola said to the crowd of about 2,500 MSPs.

In interviews with a half-dozen Channel Futures MSP 501ers and NextGen 101ers during the last four months, the level of frustration around billing issues was high and the complaints varied. They included random, unrecognizable charges; missing records of monthly invoices; different pricing components for the same service or product; confusing billing statements that lacked important invoicing data; billing the wrong credit card; overcharging and long waits for repayment; and a lot of “we’re working on it.”

“It’s horrible. I think it is the worst thing I’ve seen in terms of administration done in this industry,” said one MSP, who had 14 meetings in less than a year with the vendor over billing issues.

“That’s on us,” Voccola said from the stage about the overall problems. “There’s no excuse. It’s not because it was someone else’s fault. It was something we didn’t do well.”

DattoCon 2023: Voccola Promises Better Billing System

Voccola did say that integrating the different systems of two very large companies is a difficult task. Kaseya, Voccola said, had external reasons to move quickly on the integration. Many MSPs thought it was too quick. About 8% of customers suffered issues early on, Voccola said, with that number dropping to about 2% today. It should be less than 1% by October, which is about normal for a software company the size of Kaseya, Voccola noted.

“We believe by the end of the year the experience will be super kickass with a whole bunch of new things coming in the months and months to follow,” he said at DattoCon 2023. “But I’ll be very candid; we dropped the ball here. This was a mess-up on our part and I want to apologize to the group that’s been affected by it, because the last thing we want to do is break things.”