What the demo leaves out of the price

Imagine an account-review demo that looks promising: relevant records appear, a draft is written and someone receives it for approval. Now ask what made that possible. The supplier may have used prepared data, extra services or engineering work in its own environment. You need to know which of those ingredients are included in your proposal before treating the demonstration as the thing you are buying.

Google says the Gemini Enterprise app and Agent Platform are separate purchases, billed by seat and consumption respectively. Microsoft requires a standalone Copilot Studio plan for publishing to outside channels.^1,2,3,4

Ask for a plain-language list of what the purchase includes: what employees can do, which environments they receive, which systems connect and who sets everything up. Match each essential step in the demo to a line in the proposal. If it depends on an edition or service that has not been quoted, keep it open until the scope includes it. The buying team should be able to explain how the demonstrated process becomes the purchased one.^1,4

Nexus confirms that a SOC 2 Type 2 report exists; Ledgerline has not inspected it. WRITER’s documentation places different limits on guardrails and event logs for custom agents.^5,6,7

Give your security reviewers the proposed data route and list of products with the evidence request. Let them identify which reports, settings and trial cases they need to examine. A company’s certification badge cannot tell them whether the agent type, model processing and region in this proposal meet their requirements. Settle what is being reviewed before assembling a folder of documents that may cover a different service.

Keep three columns in the review notes: what the supplier says, what evidence it supplies and what your reviewer accepts. Put source citations in the first two as appropriate. Record an accepted report review or a passing trial in the third only after the person responsible has completed it. That distinction matters when a claim is repeated in meetings: repetition should not turn a promised safeguard into one your team has checked.

Relevance AI’s documentation separates Actions from Vendor Credits for model and tool usage. Dify says cloud users can switch to their own API key after message credits run out. Nexus confirms pricing per role automated, without billing for consultant time.^8,9,10,5

Give suppliers the same assumptions for a normal operating period and a peak period. Include failed attempts, retries, human review, connected content, setup and changes. With a quote per role, define what the role covers and which change would make it a different scope. With consumption pricing, measure the full trial run. Multiplying the price of a single model call will miss work elsewhere in the process.

For the account review, make separate rows for preparing drafts, refreshing source records, rerunning rejected drafts and reviewing difficult cases. Add your staff’s time managing permissions, quality and suppliers. Ask the budget owner to examine that worksheet alongside the quote. A low published starting price does not tell you which offer costs less once the entire process and the people running it are included.

Before the trial starts, list what your organization must keep if it fails or the service later ends: source material, approved outputs, configuration, evaluation examples, activity records and the business procedure. Ask what can be exported, in which format, by whom and while which licenses are still active. A downloaded file is useful only if your team can use it for the next step; it does not automatically let you run the process elsewhere.

Dify’s deployment documentation says changing the database or vector-store setting does not migrate existing data.¹¹

That warning makes the transition work concrete: someone must do it. Ask for a handback plan naming the people responsible and what they depend on. For the account review, require a usable copy of the procedure, accepted drafts and evaluation cases before access ends. Have procurement and legal colleagues examine the actual renewal, termination and data terms. This guide helps you prepare those questions; it does not interpret your contract.¹¹