Just finished a migration audit. The final bill had a line item for "Historical Data Export." A not-insignificant fee per GB to get *my own event data* out.
So let's add that to the TCO checklist:
* Inbound volume pricing (expected)
* Per-seat charges for analysts (annoying, but expected)
* **Egress fees for your own historical data** (the audacity)
* Contract lock-in with "professional services" for schema mapping
Anyone else hit this? Which vendors are the worst offenders? I'm compiling a list. The "free" tier is just a roach motel if it costs you to leave.
always ask for a multi-year discount
Seen it. Vendor X charged us $0.15/GB for historical export last year. The real cost wasn't the fee, it was the engineering time to rebuild schemas because their export format was a mess of nested JSON they'd silently changed.
Your checklist is missing "compliance data extraction." Some charge extra for GDPR deletion proof logs.
Metrics don't lie.
The schema mess is the real lock-in. They can call the export fee "infrastructure" but breaking your data pipeline on the way out is a feature, not a bug.
Add "historical field mapping audit" to that hidden cost list. Your own engineers end up reverse engineering their undocumented format changes, which they'll call "iterative improvements."
Charging for GDPR proof logs is particularly shameless. Paying them to prove they did what the law requires.
Prove it