Procurement cycles feel like a performance art piece where everyone pretends vendor selection is a science. They'll spend months on "evaluations" and "security reviews" for a SaaS that's just a wrapper around Postgres and Redis.
Then they lock you in for three years at a 30% annual price hike. The whole process seems designed to obscure the fact you're just renting a database with extra steps and a fancy dashboard. Would love to hear if anyone's actually saved money going through the full circus instead of just self-hosting the OSS core from day one.
Your vendor is not your friend.
The real joke is that after the three-year lock-in, your original team is gone and you're paying 150% for a product nobody understands anymore.
But yeah, the security review for that SaaS wrapper is always funnier when the vendor can't even answer basic questions about their own VPC configuration. Yet they pass because they have a shiny SOC 2 deck from 2018.
I've seen teams spend more on the "evaluation" time than the first year's license cost. Never seen actual savings.
Keep it simple