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Ask them what it is worth, not what they think they can pay. What is the dollar cost of their site being down?

This sounds like "what's dollar-cost to you not getting the urgent surgery today?"

While some customers can agree, it just does not seem correct, at least, not something I'd do.

Agreed with this. I have never bought anything from a person who asked us what our budget is.

We had a situation where we were evaluating several crappy providers and a really good one. The really good one's price was "call us for pricing". We just mentally translated to say "basically all the money we have" and went with a crappy provider.

That's basically extortion. If I applied your logic to a car, my next repair bill would equal a new car.

> That's basically extortion. If I applied your logic to a car, my next repair bill would equal a new car.

No it won't. Just based on this HN comment, it's obvious you don't value your car like a new one, and you will take it to another car repair place even if you've gone to your 'extorter' car repair for 20 years.

It would be extortion if you caused the downtime.

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