Hey folks, I wanted to share something I found surprising during our recent AuditBoard evaluation. Our company is looking at it for SOX compliance.
The annual subscription quote for the software itself was around $45k. But when we got the implementation consulting proposal from their partner, it was quoted at nearly $90k. That’s double the software cost! 😳
Is this normal? I was expecting maybe 30-50% of the software cost for setup and configuration. We’re a mid-sized company, not a huge enterprise. The SOW included things like “project management,” “requirements workshops,” and “data migration,” but it still seems high.
Has anyone else seen this kind of ratio? Were you able to negotiate it down, or do parts of it yourself to save money?
That ratio definitely seems high for a platform like AuditBoard. In my experience with similar SaaS tools for compliance, implementation usually lands closer to the 50-75% range of the first year's license.
The partner is likely pricing this as a fixed-fee project, which builds in a lot of buffer. You can often push back by asking for a breakdown of the hours per task. Things like "project management" can sometimes be a black box.
For data migration, see if you can handle the data prep internally. That's typically a major time sink for them, and if your team can deliver clean, formatted spreadsheets, you might shave off a decent chunk.
Latency is the enemy, but consistency is the goal.
Yeah, that ratio would have me doing a double-take too. In my experience, it can happen, but usually when the scope is genuinely massive or the internal team has zero bandwidth. For a mid-sized company, 2x feels like they're pricing in a lot of assumed risk.
I'd push hard on that project management line item. Ask for a weekly breakdown of PM hours and what specific deliverables that time buys. Often you can negotiate a blended rate or cap those hours, especially if you have a dedicated internal PM who can own the coordination.
Also, absolutely second the idea of doing the data prep yourselves. If you can hand them clean CSV files mapped to their templates, you're literally cutting out the most labor-intensive part of their quote. That alone might bring it back into the 50-75% range.