Then your renewal comes up and you’ve already spent another million in salaries and bespoke shit to make it work for you and the sales guy hits you with 500k again because you’re in too deep.
Cisco was legendary around here (20+ years ago when I was around networking). They would win almost every tender, often with quotes below cost if that is what it took. And everyone in the know knew you would be paying much, much more over the next few years with support costs, renewals, etc. The first hit is free.
No it doesn’t this makes zero sense. $40k is way too much for operational costs and way too little for human costs.
If you only count operational costs and a hypothetical skeleton crew to maintain it it probably costs damn near nothing to add another customer.
But once you include the salaries of 20 to 2000 engineers and the rest of the business to support them it’s a whole different ballgame. A major feature that takes one team 6 weeks to build costs a little less than half a mil in engineer salaries.
Software by its nature is weighted heavily in upfront costs and so pricing is “how little can we afford to charge to be in the black with ARR, how much do our competitors charge, and how much would it cost you to build it yourself.”
I spoke with a vendor last week who came in at 500k. I told them my budget was 250k, price came back at 255k.