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.
- 1Absorbing the migration labor costs as part of general stack management and cost of doing business
- 2Raising overall service prices slightly later to cover tooling improvements rather than charging a direct migration fee
In their words
Unedited, most upvoted first, 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
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