The cheap seat that costs eight lakh to switch on.
Per-seat price is the number in the proposal. Implementation, integration and training are the number you actually pay. A three-year total that includes migration is the only comparison worth running.
A licence at a low monthly price looks like a bargain until you total what it takes to make it useful. We have watched buyers choose the cheaper seat and spend several times the difference getting the thing to work — and we have lost deals to vendors whose real cost surfaced eighteen months later.
So here is the sheet we hand buyers, including when they are evaluating us.
The five numbers that actually matter
Where cheap gets expensive
The pattern is consistent. Low licence cost is usually funded by shifting work to you or to a partner you must pay separately. That is not dishonest — it is a business model — but it means the proposal is not the price.
The reverse also happens: an expensive suite that connects to what you already run out of the box can be the cheaper three-year answer, because the integration line collapses to zero. You cannot see any of this from a pricing page.
Nobody has ever regretted asking what the second year costs.
Two questions vendors dislike
First: what does year two cost, in writing, with the introductory discount gone? Second: what is the fixed fee to migrate our data, and what happens if it takes longer than you estimated? Whoever answers both plainly is telling you how the next three years will go.
For what it is worth, our own answer is a flat per-seat price with guided migration included and no implementation fee — partly because it is simple to explain, and mostly because we would rather not have this conversation in month eighteen.