[ihavenofish]

When something says 'request a quote' it really means 'bend over please mate'.
Even having different licence levels, can't give a set price for a basic user.
Usually a red flag to overpaying for a service.
Get the negotiating head on.

This is something I rage at in this industry. I literally go to CMTS and ask company X "how much does this cost" and then can't tell me. If you can't tell me the price of the thing you are selling, I don't want it. What you inevitably find out when you push is the price is whatever they can extract from you.

It is getting a little better though, in part due to companies like autodesk, haas, etc who publish the actual price you pay and force other companies to at the very least have a legitimate base price. I say legitimate, cause if for example you called DMG Mori some years ago and said how "much is a milltap 700" they would tell you an FU base price that was idiotic like 180k cdn and then eventually 5 month later after you have gone to buy something else offer a package with all the trimmings for 107k cdn (an actual viable deal). Reason being they simply didn't care about single customers. These days with all the garage youtubers ready to drop 100k, they are much more responsive.

This goes for part suppliers as well, like THK, delta, siemens, etc when you want to build machines. The will actually respond to you as a customer these days, where NSK and yaskawa (at least as of 2-3 years ago) would give you the FU price and hope you didn't call back. Like NSK will literally quote you 2-3 times the price of the same ball screw listed on misumi usa which is already 2x the price of the same ballscrew on monotaro (japan). They are waiting for foxconn to call, they don't care about selling to you. Now that Yaskawa owns Siemens automation, I worry, although so far nothing seems to have changed (haven't had a quote since before covid though).

/rant