Should you charge clients when you switch their software tools?
Charging clients for a tool migration you initiated for your own operational or quality improvements is widely considered unfair because they didn't ask for the change. Attempting to bill them for this labor risks damaging the client relationship over a transition that offers them no direct requested benefit.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
Found another way around this?
Share your steps and trade-offs so fellow engineers don't have to reinvent the wheel. No account required.
- 1Absorbing the migration labor costs as part of general stack management and cost of doing businessDid this help you?
- 2Raising overall service prices slightly later to cover tooling improvements rather than charging a direct migration feeDid this help you?
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“If it's a business decision we're making in terms of swapping out a piece of our stack that we whitelabel to our customers (i.e. our RMM or EDR) then no.”source ↗
“We are going through this change right now with EDR. Why would someone charge a customer for something they didn’t initiate?”source ↗
“Say one MDM to another, or EDR? The move is our instigation as a quality improvement. Would anyone charge to do this sort of thing?”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
- 6How to bill clients for API costs and software licenses
- 17How to use AI for accounting without breaking client confidentiality
- 2Is switching to cheaper software worth the migration and setup time?
- 4Why am I paying a monthly fee to sell software for commission?
- 4How to pitch clients without doing unpaid work
- 3Why is business invoicing and deposit billing so messy?