Decision review / Quotes and pricing
Not whether you can afford it. Whether it is worth it.
A quote is an opening position written by the party being paid, and the number on the front is the least interesting thing about it. What matters is which line items cover real work, what has been left out so the total reads competitively, what reprices in year two, and what it would cost you to leave.
What we read for
Six things a quote is designed not to draw attention to.
None of these require bad faith on the vendor’s part. They are the normal shape of a document written to be accepted.
What is outside the line items
Data migration, out-of-hours cutover, training, the third-party licence the design depends on. Work that has to happen, priced later, when you are already committed.
Year two and year three
Introductory pricing, ramped licence tiers, support that steps up after the first term. The number that matters is the one across the life of the thing, not the one on the cover.
Units that are not what they seem
Per user, per device, per core, per gigabyte ingested. Which of those grows with your business, and how fast, is often the single largest variable in the total.
What the assumptions are doing
Most quotes carry a short assumptions section that quietly transfers risk to you. It is the most load-bearing paragraph in the document and the least read.
Lock-in and the cost of leaving
Proprietary formats, data extraction fees, professional services required to exit, notice periods. What it costs to change your mind in year two is part of the price.
Whether the scope solves the problem
The most expensive finding is not an inflated price. It is a correctly priced quote for work that does not fix what you were trying to fix.
What you get
A read you could hand to the vendor.
Written to be forwarded. Most clients send some or all of it straight back to the party who wrote the quote, so it states what it found without editorialising about who wrote it.
A marked-up read
Line by line: what is covered, what is not, and what has been assumed. Plus the questions that should be put in writing before anybody signs.
A total cost view
The full-term number with the ramps and the growth units modelled, so you are comparing the real cost rather than the first invoice.
A recommendation
Accept, accept with these changes, go back to market, or solve it a different way. With the reasoning, and with what would change the answer.
Who you are working with
Read by someone who has approved quotes like it, and paid for the ones that were wrong.
VanDien.io is led by Christopher Moskowitz, who most recently ran engineering for Jefferies, a full service capital markets, investment bank, leading a 55-person organization that supported more than 16,000 endpoints on a budget of $15M to $20M. The instinct for which line item is doing the quiet work was built by signing for them and then owning the result for the next three years.
Related reviews
If the quote is part of something larger.
Common questions
Can you tell us what this should cost?
We can tell you whether the price is reasonable for the work described, which is the more useful question. A precise market rate for a bespoke scope does not exist, and anyone quoting one confidently is guessing at your expense.
We have three quotes. Can you compare them?
Yes, and that is often more revealing than reviewing one, because competing proposals rarely scope the same work. Normalising them onto a like-for-like basis is usually where the real difference in price turns out to be.
How fast can you turn this around?
A single quote is usually a short piece of work. Tell us the date you have to respond by when you send the request, and you will be told at scoping whether it is achievable.
Will you negotiate on our behalf?
We will give you the positions and the reasoning, and we can sit in the call if you want us there. We do not act as your agent or take a share of what we save you, because a percentage of the saving is a reason to find one whether it exists or not.
Send the quote. We will tell you what it does not say.
info@vandien.io · (551) 236-3191 · Ridgewood, NJ, serving the New York metro