ERP quotes aren’t comparable. That’s the business model.

In 1970 George Akerlof described a used car market where sellers know which cars are sound and buyers do not.¹ The result is not that buyers get unlucky. It is worse and more interesting: because nobody can tell a good car from a bad one before buying, nobody will pay a good-car price, so the good cars stop being offered, and what is left is the bad ones. Quality stops being worth signalling. Price becomes the only thing anybody can see.

Now go and lay three ERP quotes side by side. One is priced per user per month. One is a single implementation figure with modules listed. One is a day rate with an estimate attached. Nothing lines up. There is no column you can compare.

That is not three sales teams being disorganised. That is the market working exactly as the theory says it will.

Why nobody quotes the same shape

A vendor who quotes in a form you can compare has handed you the one thing that lets you leave. A vendor who quotes in their own shape has made you compare on trust, on the demo, and on how the meeting felt.

And the honest vendor is in the worst position of all, because the honest quote is the one with the awkward lines in it — data migration, the month of parallel running, training people who do not want to be trained. Those lines are real, and they make the number bigger. Against a quote that leaves them out, the honest one just looks expensive.

The vendor whose quote looks worst is often the only one who has read your business properly. That is the trap, and it is structural rather than anybody’s fault.

The three numbers, only one of which you were shown

Figures below are mine, picked to show the shape. Use yours.

Say the quote is four lakh. That is the number in the document and the number you will negotiate.

Then there is what it takes to be running: getting the data out of where it lives now, deciding what a customer record even is when three systems disagree, a month of doing everything twice while you check, and the weeks where people are learning instead of working. Call it three lakh, and note that almost none of it is paid to the vendor.

Then there is the part nobody can quote, because it has not happened yet: the changes. Every business discovers in month four that the system does not do the one thing that makes it that business. Then it is change requests, at whatever rate the contract set, and by then you are not shopping any more. Call it five lakh over three years, and understand that this is the line with the widest spread and the one that decides everything.

Four lakh, quoted. Twelve lakh, roughly, over three years. The negotiation happened on the first number.

Two things that make it worse, and both are about being alone

A large company buying this has a procurement function, a technology person with no stake in the outcome, and half a dozen peers who have bought the same thing and will tell them what it really cost. An owner-operator has none of that. There is no reference price, because there is nobody to ask.²

And when a decision cannot be resolved, it does not get made. It gets deferred, and deferral feels free because nothing visible happens.³This is where the three-year version of the story comes from — the owner who has been “looking at systems” since 2023, who is not indecisive, but is holding three documents that genuinely cannot be compared, and is quite reasonably not choosing.

How to make them comparable, which is your job and not theirs

You cannot make vendors quote in one shape. You can refuse to compare them in theirs. Send all three the same page and ask each to fill it in.

1. Three years, total, in rupees. One number. Licence, implementation, support, everything. If they will not put a number on year three, that is the answer to a different question.
2. Your day rate for a change request, in writing, now. Not later, not on request. The rate you set before signing is the only rate you will ever have any say over.
3. Who does the data migration, and is it in the number. Almost every overrun I have seen lives in this line.
4. What happens to my data if I leave. Format, cost, notice period. A vendor who has not thought about this has told you how the relationship ends.
5. Two customers my size, in my trade, that I can call. Not a logo. A phone number. This is the closest thing to a peer network you can buy, and it costs nothing.

The last one matters most. The whole problem is that you cannot judge quality before you buy. One honest phone call with somebody two years into the same system tells you more than every demo you will sit through.