ALL the Options Cost Money. Yes. All of Them.

[Dips]

I got an email for a quote to combine a few older licenses (totalling 15 seats all together) into a single license updated to the latest version, but with 18 seats. I had to run it through a formula we use to caculate these things and got back to them with a number around $3000.

They came back and aske me, what if they just kept it at 15 seats? So I gave them that number. It was less, but not by much.

Then they came back a THIRD time with a bunch of other possible splits and recombinations, which I'm too tired to explain. Let's just say they all resulted in either 15 or 18 seats and cost about the same as quoted before with 18 always costing more than 15. And it took forever to do.

We now have about 8 different quotes for roughly the same thing and not a single one is cheap. Nor does a single one break the "getting more costs more" rule. There is no magic combination they can come up with that will go radically against the reality that it's going to cost them money. If they don't want to spend money, they can just not buy anything. It's not that hard a concept, right?

I swear if I come back tomorrow and find that they want another quote, I'm tacking on another $500 and will add $500 each time thereafter until they stop with the quote requests.

Agh.

[Calud]

Idiot-tax is 100% legit in many countries in the world including the SCs whereabouts: Dreamland!

[Bandit]

Sounds like you were dealing with some of the salescritters from the telco I used to work at. They always wanted to present the customer with *all* possible options. What on the first pass always ended up with about 64 different quotes.

Too bad the salescritters never shared what they were smoking.

My sympathies.

B

[bainsidhe]

We have one international customer who is essentially quoted/charged a PITA tax on every order. Amount ranges from $300-$500 for a quote that overall amounts to $3000-10,000 dollars. Why so much? Because we'll specifically instruct the customer to send payment a certain way direct to our bank, which limits the amount of fees charged for transfer. Instead, the company tends to go through multiple banks before ultimately reaching us. Nothing is illegal mind you, everything is perfectly on the up and up. This customer is just dead set on doing it their way. Which means we, as the receiver of funds, suddenly are charged multiple fees from each bank that can easily amount to a few hundred dollars. So the PITA tax is more of an "insurance" fee if you will. We started tacking that on after being pinged $600 for a certain order.

So I say, go ahead and charge more. Part of the software cost involves labor and your time is valuable. Let us know what their reply is

[Chromatix]

The thing about transfer fees is, that if the fees reduce the amount *you* receive from the payment, you can withhold the goods because they technically haven't paid in full. So they then have to make another payment to make up the difference.

Most banks (if they are at all sane) will allow the payer to say "charge all necessary fees to my account", rather than the other way round, so there's really no excuse.