Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fuck I hate this. I've avoided buying storage servers from ixsystems, despite the fact their products seem to be exactly what we need, because they won't tell me how much they fucking cost. They want to have a "conversation" about "solutions". Fuck you. Sell me boxes and tell me how much they cost. But they won't.
I work for a vendor and I'm not allowed to tell my clients pricing because I'm not qualified to make deals. We don't even have a list price published internally, it's all at the salesman's discretion. That means some clients pay $150k, some pay $300k, some get it for free bundled with another purchase. Far too often I'm asked "budgetary pricing" but even that is a conversation with a solution architect and a virtual…
Last project I could have spent that money to pay for 3-4 additional full time engineers for 3 years and built a better solution with open source because I still had to devote 2 plus myself to do integration. And then didn't have overpriced SMS for the next decade and licensing headaches and afford to keep at least 1 of the engineers indefinitely.