We were in no way one of "their biggest accounts". We were a couple guys in a cramped office over a mattress store, with a production service so small we could have run it from my old laptop. I guarantee it cost them at least 10x more to send those consultants over to us than we spent on AWS in a year, even before the optimizations they pointed out.

But here you are, letting us know that they have been wonderful sending consultants.

It's part PR, part long term customer acquisition

Maybe, just maybe it’s a good product with good customer service? And the reason it costs so much is because you get what you pay for?

Yes it is, but the gp is also right that it is part of a well calculated and proven way of keep existing customers and getting new ones. $$$ is the reason they do that, else this would not exist.

Exactly. It's about developer lifetime value, not single customers.

Right - it gives the illusion that you're 'getting an amazing deal and wow these people are great' when it reality you're probably getting gouged without the consulting and have to opt in for fair prices.

I mean it's a retention tactic at the company scale but for the individual consultant they're genuinely trying to help you out.

I frequent a local family-owned Italian restaurant/pizza place and my usual order jalapeños, banana peppers, and roasted garlic so I do a build you own. Totally fine, happy to pay the price. But one day I come in and the woman working the take-out counter sees my order before it goes in and tells me that if I order a "meat lovers", remove two toppings and sub the rest it comes out way cheaper.

So now I'm the vegetarian that always gets a meat lovers and she makes the joke every time I come in.

I don't think it's weird or nefarious that a business doesn't have completely consistent pricing and holding it differently can save you money. When we spec out services on AWS we're using the official calculator when deciding whether it's "worth it" so to us at least it genuinely feels like we're saving money.

> So now I'm the vegetarian that always gets a meat lovers and she makes the joke every time I come in.

I've seen that before, and I've also seen the opposite where people buy the veggie pizza and then add a meat or two on top to get a cheaper supreme pizza.

I did an online food ordering startup a ways back, and it was very surprising how few of the restaurant owners we talked to had clearly thought through pricing strategy for things like this.

We had originally gone in with clever ways for owners to describe how different changes would affect the price of an item, but ended up landing on just a giant matrix where they could input the end result price for any combination. The owners couldn't articulate their own pricing well enough to model it well.

This is true even for enterprise sales. Hello "contact us for pricing"!

Do you really think any company of any size doesn’t do a rational cost/benefit analysis when deciding when to build vs buy or when and what to outsource?

Yep. To be frank I think that spinning it as a joke and not an honest retention tactic almost feels like lying.

If you are any decent size and you pay for a partner’s “Well Architect” overview, they will give you the money back in credits. I am not at liberty to say how much we spend, but it’s not over a million.