Setup fee

A setup fee is the one-time sum billed at the start of a subscription, meant to cover installation work: number porting, forwarding configuration, knowledge base building, training. Amounts range from zero — the standard for modern self-serve tools — to several thousand dollars for accompanied rollouts.

A setup fee's honesty test fits in three questions: what exactly does it cover (a task list, not a vague package)? Is it refunded if the trial leads nowhere? And does it come back with every plan change? A setup that pays for real work — configuring a custom agent, say — is an investment; a setup that exists only to make leaving costly is a captivity tax. The difference shows on the itemized invoice.