I worked for a company that was incredibly high touch and kept getting burned by inadvertently giving free consulting on system design only for the customer to just hire a generic development contractor to implement it.

They thought they got smart by adding a contract to the process that had a six digit contracting fee if the customer went with another vendor.

The first big fish was more than happy to pay their consulting fee and then develop everything in house. To them, the fee (which didn’t really cover the opportunity cost or development time) was a pittance.