No no no. Please do not pay them that.
A new client, first call, twenty minutes in, and I already knew Drupal was going to save them a recurring monthly invoice.
They are on an enterprise SaaS platform and they wanted one feature added. A slightly unusual approval flow for part of their sales team. Nothing exotic.
The vendor's quote: six figures, twelve months, plus a licence uplift, because their own internal process pushed them into a higher tier. And the thing would still belong to the vendor.
They asked me, almost apologetically, if I could make it cheaper.
I built a rough version. Most of it Drupal already does out of the box. Sent them a two-minute video of it working.
Six weeks for production. Their infrastructure. Their code. And nobody can ever charge them a tier upgrade for having their own process.
“For two years we have been changing how we work to fit the software.” That is the real invoice. Not the six figures. Two years of an organisation making itself smaller to fit inside someone else's roadmap.
Vendor lock-in is poison. It does not kill you on signing day. It works slowly, one small compromise at a time, until you cannot remember how your business used to run.
Drupal has never once asked me to do that. Twelve years, and it still just shrugs and says: sure, build it your way. It is your site.