Haggling is often prized in private life, a trait possessed by people worthy of admiration. The opposite is true too. People can seem like a pushover if they accept the fate they are given in commerce.
Cheapskatery explored
There are two sides to this phenomenon: on one, the friend who shirks their duties at happy hour, maybe ordering a water for themselves, not grabbing a round: Lame! It's not the worst thing in the world, an annoyance more than anything. On the other, its incredibly useful to have that one friend in the group, asking for a deal, using coupons, arguing to remove a service from the bill that was sub-par, the prized roommate who looks forward to a verbal scuffle with the landlord, or utility provider.
How does this apply to your business?
In the "default state" of building out the technology footprint of your business, SaaS providers expect you to pay the market rate on their website, or oftentimes lure you into a dark alley with the "Contact For Enterprise Pricing" language on their website, or as part of a video, demo.
Also as part of this song and dance, SaaS providers can always provide a discount. Some even offer free trials, or less expensive tiers for nonprofits, or for any number of seemingly benevolent reasons. We know the insides of every ecommerce/billing/subscription service on the planet, and every one of them has an option to modify pricing, set discounts, issue promocodes, coupons, etc. They will only mention that they cannot do this, and refuse to elaborate if prodded.
Internal to every salesperson's workflow is a very important formula called "Profitability". More sophisticated SaaS providers even try to calculate the "Customer Lifetime Value" (CLV) if they snag your signature on a document and form a legally binding commercial agreement to procure their wares. They don't care about you, they only care about these numbers. You too should only care about these numbers, but in the reverse. Be a terrible customer, get these numbers as low as possible (I assure you the AWS Kubernetes cluster that is running this service won't mind). Force your young and charming salesperson to work deep into their 40's.
Not Invented Here (NIH) Syndrome
This disease (it's not a disease actually) is defined as thus:
"...describes a cognitive bias that leads individuals and organizations to reject or undervalue external ideas in favor of internally developed solutions."
This is of course a veritable minefield of topics to discuss. At what layer of abstraction should we stop inventing? Maybe in the 70's and 80's large enterprises wrote their own assembly code (to make printers or whatever Hewlett Packard were doing back then), nowadays that preference has shifted considerably (though you would be well within your right to suggest a dependency audit in your tech stack, with the rise of supply chain attacks or reviewing the failure modes of foundational technologies in your enterprise, like Crowdstrike).
Enterprises nowadays may be overreliant on SaaS systems to do everything for them, using overlapping or competing tools simultaneously. This term may have even inverted it's meaning recently. Enterprises are too quick to adopt, even overpay for something, as a source of pride (tokenmaxxing??), that has an alternative that is human, open-source, or otherwise already bundled into your hardware or software stack.
Just like the George Carlin quote,
anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac
Anyone building more foundational software/tools/processes for their company than your preference is a maniac, and anyone spending more on SaaS or AI than you is an idiot.
Time for a values and tradeoffs assessment
As part of every project I've started or managed since I turned about 25, I like to get the whole team's input on implicit values, as well as synthesizing those into explicit values that apply to the project and agree what those mean as we go about our activities for the project. Not having these things agreed to can serve to slow down or create friction and stress for every action taken during the project (establishing them can serve to convince you that your teammates are neither maniacs nor idiots). Establishing and agreeing on these can challenge the norms at a company and become either annoying to leadership and usually evolutionary, or are seemingly a more mature way of expressing what is already the way the sausage is made at your organization. One of the main values that ONLY leadership is allowed to set is often the "Cost" parameter, even before the "Value" of the project can be determined. A lot more on this in another post in the future...
The summary: You are capable of more than you think
However, this post serves as an argument to shift our preference for "Cost Control" to be more like leadership: spend less. Shocking, to hear this coming from me, to tell a team how to think or feel without ever having gotten to know them. Yes, be a little bit more of a cheapskate! It will do you good. But the corollary to this is "build more", "do it yourself", or "find something that does this almost as well for free" and while so doing, be proud of it, learn a little (perhaps even about yourself), get messy and enjoy the ride.
You don't need every fancy gadget under the sun, or SaaS tool. I often shake my head in meetings when someone says we need to adopt Tubu, or Beeboo, or Dippy (but with ads), or even Weeno because it's "best-in-class" or cite a Gartner report, and think of the wise Mr. Money Moustache,
You too want to participate. You drive yourself to the restaurant in your own borrowed car and live “the good life”. It can be pleasant to indulge in these things, and it sure is easy. But there’s another path available: the more difficult yet far better one.
Just like my friends, I don't want my clients strung out on Beeboo, or Dippy.
Questions about this? Get in touch — the first conversation is always free.