Things That Your SaaS Vendor Won't Provide You With
Your cloud vendor would be happy to provide you with great features except a few, which they are going to say no straight to your face.
Out of best practices, experience, and knowledge of what each cloud vendor can do, there is a list of things that the client can expect them to say yes to confidently. But counter-intuitively, there are few things they will never agree to. Adam Mansfield writes in CIODIVE about three requests you can respectfully make that will help you achieve other terms and conditions in your agreement when negotiating with a cloud vendor.
Your cloud vendor will not give you a refund or credit for products you did not use over the term of your subscription. This is often due to issues with revenue recognition; in these cases, they cannot offer a refund or credit.
When your vendor denies you a refund for maybe not using a product, ask for your swap rights in your contract.
When requesting cloud services, customers should inquire about moving between different cloud solutions without penalties.
The cloud vendor will not allow you to reset your unit pricing once a certain volume has been met; all they can do is reset the pricing for the units at and above the volume threshold.
The hassle of negotiating a price when you need to add more users to your account is eliminated by setting the baseline at the lower per-unit price just in case.
You can remind the vendor that they didn't lower the per-unit price for all the committed volumes even though this increased level of use also resulted in increased committed fees back to the vendor.
It can be difficult to terminate your subscription during your subscription term. Your cloud vendor will not allow you to do this.
When your cloud vendor says no to your ability to terminate for convenience, you open the opportunity to remind them that you are looking to form a partnership with them and not have a transactional relationship.
A partnership requires flexibility from each party. When one party essentially is forcing another to stay in the partnership even if it is not going as expected (while also making them pay to stay in it), it isn't easy to see a true partnership.
What We Think?
It’s important to take your time to negotiate with your vendors and not rush into things, especially when you’re unclear about important factors like lock-in periods and premium features. For example, some vendors purposely make it difficult for their users to transfer their data to a competitor's service. However, if they make it flexible for the users, it means they lose revenue streams. These are some of the things to keep in mind while negotiating your next SaaS tool.
Full article here.