One Year of AlgaPSA: From Early Release to 1.5

One year ago, we released an early version of AlgaPSA. Today, we're releasing v1.5.

The idea was pretty simple: build an open-source PSA that MSPs could actually make their own. One that fits the business and the stack you already have, without asking you to replace everything around it, or making access to your own data somebody else's decision.

A year ago, we spent a lot of time thinking about what a PSA should do. Then MSPs started running their businesses through it, and reality arrived quickly.

Actual Businesses Are Not Always Straightforward

When we were starting to build AlgaPSA, the concepts seemed reasonably tidy. A client is a client. A contract defines what they pay for. Work happens. An invoice comes out the other end.

Then real businesses get involved.

One client turns out to have several legal entities that need separate invoices. Twenty prepaid hours need to carry over until they're actually used. After-hours work may count differently. A client wants one relationship with the MSP, but separate costs for each location. None of this is surprising if you've run an MSP. But software has a habit of pretending the world is tidier than it is.

Much of the work in v1.5 came from running into those edge cases. Billing Profiles let one client contain multiple separately billed entities without pretending they're unrelated companies. Prepaid hours can carry forward until they're actually used. Hour pools can cover different kinds of work at different rates.

No single billing feature is the point. But together they make AlgaPSA better at representing businesses as they actually operate instead of asking the business to simplify themselves for the software.

We've Seen the Same Pattern Across the Platform

These aren't ideas we'd have written on a whiteboard under “features every PSA needs.” They're things you learn once people spend their days in the product.

A technician needs a credential while working a ticket, so the credential should be available on the ticket. Someone wants to prepare a customer update now but send it tomorrow morning, so comments can be scheduled. One ticket board serves a completely different purpose from another, so each board should remember its own layout and filters.

That's also why AlgaPSA can keep getting broader without becoming an attempt to replace every tool an MSP uses. But the work that belongs in the PSA should feel native to it.

Sometimes that means adding something visible, like the credential vault in v1.5. Sometimes it means making an existing integration quietly do more for you, like keeping RMM device inventory synchronized on a schedule. And sometimes it means spending a surprising amount of time on work that doesn't make a particularly good screenshot.

None of these features radically changes what a PSA is. They just remove another reason to leave it.

One Year Later

The first version was about proving that AlgaPSA could be a PSA. The work since then has been about building the one that MSPs can trust every day.

Version 1.5 still has plenty of shiny things. Assets have maintenance schedules now. Invoices and quotes can be generated in the customer's language. RMM inventory can keep itself synchronized. The mobile app keeps getting closer to the work technicians actually do away from their desks.

But one year in, the feature count isn't what feels most significant. The conversations are. They have changed from basic pieces of a PSA to discussions of a specific contract with a particular client, an unusual billing arrangement, a workflow somebody has refined over ten years, or the one thing their current PSA forces them to do backwards.

Those are harder problems, and much more interesting ones.

A lot of the credit for getting us here belongs to the MSPs who believed in AlgaPSA early: they ran it when it was rough, reported the strange bugs, and patiently explained the billing arrangements we hadn't imagined yet. Almost every corner case in this post came from one of them.

Thank you for trusting us with your real businesses.

Heading on to year two.