No price list: where a Kyber deployment quote comes from

A manufacturing company, the owner and the head of IT on a call with a supplier. The owner has one question ready and asks it first: what does a deployment cost? The supplier says it depends. The owner has heard “it depends” from every consultant she has ever met and takes it as the opening move of a negotiation she would rather not have.

So she asks the next supplier, who has a price list. Three packages, a feature table, a tick in every column of the most expensive one. It looks like a straight answer. Eight months later the project is in its third change order, each one for something the table did not mention: the connection to the ERP, the second site, the fact that twelve people need different permissions from the other forty.

The first supplier was not dodging. The second one was, and did it with a table.

The cause is in what is being sold. Nobody is selling the software; it is open and the company could download it tonight. What is sold is the work of putting it into one specific business, and that work is shaped entirely by the business. A price list for it would be a price list for an average company, and the owner on that call is not running an average company. The honest answer is not a number but a method for arriving at one, in the open.

Where a quote actually comes from

The inventory of what has to be connected. Every system KYBERIOS has to read from or write to is a piece of work: the ERP, the accounting package, the warehouse scanner software, the spreadsheet that is secretly the production schedule. Each one has to be understood, connected, tested and documented. Two connections and twelve connections are not the same deployment, and the difference is not visible from outside.

The number of roles and identities. A company where everyone may see everything and a company where sales must not see purchase prices, the warehouse must not see payroll and contractors must not see customers are different deployments. Every distinct role is a set of rules to write, test and keep. KyberDeck devices, one identity per person, follow the same arithmetic.

The rules that have to be written. What an agent may suggest, what it may do up to which limit and what waits for a person is written with the people who make those decisions today. A company with three such decisions and a company with thirty differ by the hours of conversation it takes to get them right, and those hours are the part that does not get cheaper with practice.

Hardware or borrowed capacity. A server the company already owns, a server that has to be bought and hardened, or a rule for borrowing compute from KyberFusion for the jobs that may leave the building: three different costs, and the choice is the customer’s, made with the trade-offs written down.

Training time. How many people have to be able to run the system without calling anyone, and what they know today. A team that already runs its own servers needs a different handover from a team that has never had one, and the second handover is longer by exactly the difference.

The support model. Response times by severity, the on-call window, the quarterly review, the named engineer. These are recurring, not one-off, and the shape of them follows from how much the business depends on the system by the time the handover is done.

What inflates a quote, and what shrinks it

Most of what makes a quote large is in the customer’s hands, which is a more comfortable position than it sounds.

Unknown systems inflate it. A supplier who has never seen a particular ERP has to price the learning, and an honest one says so rather than hiding it in a margin. Asking directly which of your systems the supplier has operated before, and which they have not, removes the guesswork from both sides.

Undocumented decisions inflate it. If nobody can say who approves what and above which amount, the rules have to be discovered through interviews before they can be written. A company that arrives with a page of its own approval limits has done the most expensive part of the policy work for free.

Scope that grows during the project inflates it most. The second site, the extra integration, the role nobody mentioned. The quote cannot price what the audit did not see, so the audit is where to be thorough, and the report belongs to the company whether or not it goes ahead.

Starting small shrinks it. One process, read-only, until it has been right for long enough. Write access earned one process at a time. The quote for the first step is small because the first step is small, and the next quote is made with real numbers from the company’s own system rather than estimates.

Doing the handover work shrinks it. Every hour the company’s own people spend beside the supplier is an hour the support contract does not have to carry later. A company that intends to run the system itself gets a smaller recurring line, and that intention should be visible in the quote.

A test you can run before the first call

Write down, on one page, three lists: every system your business runs that holds data a Kyber deployment would need; every role in the company that must see something others may not; and every decision an agent might one day take that today requires a specific person’s approval, with that person’s name.

Hand the page to any supplier you talk to and ask them to walk you through how each line changes their quote. A supplier who can do that, line by line, is pricing your company. A supplier who answers with a package name is pricing an average one, and the difference will arrive later as a change order.

KYBERTIS has no price list and no clients yet; the audit described on the homepage is where a quote would be built, with the arguments against included. What the support part of that quote has to cover is in the quarterly review, and the rest of the recurring cost is explained in what open source costs once it reaches production.