jas194

Agree that would be a really interesting model particularly for those small businesses

Thank you! Def. room for improvement there. Still wish there was a way out that could work for all sides if for whatever reasons things weren't working out ( ;

You are absolutely right. POC is always a great option but there are frequent challenges of vendor rushing, a later change in requirements, or insufficient Eng resources to check every box (we'll typically rely on the word of sales team in that case).

Vendor selections can definitely always be better, but there doesn't seem to be too much flexibility for buyers when all said and done. At bigger companies annual commits (or longer) are welcome, but we've certainly had tool that are a total failure yet we're stuck with the bill. Someone on the buy side ends up seeing blame too, even if not our faults i.e. missing key feature that was misunderstood in buying process

As in if you buy 50 acrobat licenses and 6 months later you only need 30?

Super interesting I've never heard of the setup fee ask -- great perspective. Will definitely use that moving forward

Great perspective. ESP, analytics vendors and BI tools are a few of the categories where "usage' has forced me into licenses that require annual subscriptions. Seems many of those companies do offer month to month options, but those are typically situated for low volume levels (emails/month sent, # of monthly API calls, etc.).

Personally, the biggest pain I've had is around poor implementations and core missing features that are only realized during implementation (some of my projects have had tricky technical & privacy requirements). In all those cases we either made do or spent far more time than estimated in building workarounds.

Interesting. I've found that for some earlier stage startups, but best in breed tend to have annual contracts as a non negotiable. Payment terms maybe, but I'm still contractually obligated for 1 year from my experience