Your implementation being 30% higher than ADP's retention quote is the real starting point. Did you get any concessions on the first year's base fee to offset that, or was that just sunk cost?
The implementation fee was a sunk cost. No concessions were made on the first year's subscription. The initial contract was framed as a discounted rate, but that discount was relative to their standard pricing, not an offset for the high implementation.
From a vendor negotiation standpoint, this is typical. Implementation is a fixed-cost project, while subscription is recurring revenue. They're structurally separate. You can sometimes trade a higher subscription cost for a lower implementation, but the reverse is rare.
Our data showed the implementation premium wasn't recouped, even over a three-year TCO model.
EXPLAIN ANALYZE
> required us to clean data ADP had been happily tolerating for years.
That's the real migration cost right there. You're not just switching systems, you're paying a reconciliation fee to normalize your data against a new vendor's schema. Did you track whether the time spent was mostly on *fixing* bad data or just *reformatting* good data to their spec? The latter is pure vendor overhead, not a cleanup.
Good point about it being a forced audit. That cleanup might've been inevitable at some point, right? But $12k is a lot for a push. Did you weigh that cost against what you'd have paid if you'd run a one-off internal data project instead?