Frequently Asked Questions

We negotiate your software and cloud contracts. When we deliver verified savings against your pre-engagement baseline, you pay us 25% of those savings. The remaining 75% stays in your budget permanently.

Before we start, we document your current contract value as a baseline. After negotiations conclude, an independent comparison confirms the savings. You receive an invoice for 25% of the verified reduction. If we save you nothing, you receive no invoice and owe nothing.

There are no retainers, no hourly fees, and no payment until savings are confirmed. Learn more on our How It Works page.

No. Zero. Our model is contractual: if we fail to deliver verified savings, you owe us nothing. We absorb the cost of analysis, negotiation preparation, and vendor engagement entirely.

This is why we only take engagements where we have genuine confidence in the savings opportunity. We do a preliminary assessment before accepting an engagement — if we don't see a meaningful savings case, we'll tell you upfront rather than waste your time.

Our standard rate is 25% of verified savings. For very large engagements (typically $10M+ in annual software spend) or multi-vendor programmes, we discuss a blended structure. Contact us to talk through the specifics of your situation.

What we won't do is add hidden fees, retainers, or success bonuses on top of that. One number, cleanly defined, paid only on savings you actually bank.

We have zero commercial relationships with any software vendor. We are not a reseller, a channel partner, or an authorised distributor for Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, or any other vendor we negotiate against. We accept no referral fees, commission, or any form of vendor compensation.

This matters because most "advisory" firms earn more from vendors than from clients. Our income comes entirely from client savings — which means our interests are perfectly aligned with yours.

Savings are calculated against a signed baseline agreed before we start. The following count as verified savings:

Contract value reduction — the new contract is worth less than the baseline renewal quote. Product elimination — we remove unused products, cutting the contract scope. Pricing reductions — we achieve lower per-unit, per-user, or per-processor pricing. Support cost reduction — negotiating off mandatory vendor support tiers. Avoided penalties — true-up amounts or audit claims we reduce or eliminate. Commercial improvements with financial value — extended payment terms, free-of-charge uplift caps, or price protection clauses.

We don't count savings that weren't going to happen anyway. If the vendor's list price dropped 5% as a result of a price change, that's not our savings — it's the market. We're transparent about the attribution.

We establish the baseline from your existing contract, the vendor's renewal quote, and any formal proposals on the table. If you have a quote from the vendor, that becomes the starting point. If you don't yet have a renewal quote, we use your current contracted value and support costs as the basis.

The baseline is agreed in writing before we take any negotiation action, so there's no dispute at the end about what constitutes a saving.

Good question. If a vendor spontaneously reduces their price after we begin engagement, we credit that as part of the negotiation outcome — because vendors don't routinely volunteer discounts unless they sense professional pushback. However, if a vendor price change is announced market-wide and affects all customers, we'd exclude that portion from the gainshare calculation.

Everything is documented and agreed before the engagement starts, so there's no ambiguity.

Step 1 — Free Assessment (1-2 weeks): We review your current contracts, renewal dates, usage data, and vendor correspondence. We estimate the savings opportunity and present our findings.

Step 2 — Engagement Letter: If you want to proceed, we sign a short engagement letter. No retainer, no upfront cost. The letter defines the baseline, the scope, and the 25% gainshare fee.

Step 3 — Forensic Analysis (1-3 weeks): We perform a detailed analysis — benchmarking your pricing against market data, identifying unused entitlements, modelling alternative licensing scenarios.

Step 4 — Negotiation (2-8 weeks depending on vendor): We negotiate directly with the vendor or coach your team. We know vendor playbooks, quarter-end tactics, and discount thresholds because we helped design them on the vendor side.

Step 5 — Savings Verified and Closed: The new contract is signed, savings are verified against baseline, and we issue our gainshare invoice. You keep 75% of every dollar saved — permanently.

See the full breakdown on our How It Works page.

For a single-vendor renewal negotiation, the typical timeline is 6-10 weeks from kickoff to signed contract. Oracle and SAP engagements can run 10-14 weeks due to their complexity. AWS and Microsoft deals often move faster — 4-6 weeks — especially if there's a renewal deadline.

The assessment phase can move faster if you have a time-sensitive renewal. We've run compressed 2-week engagements for clients facing imminent renewal dates.

Both. We can lead negotiations directly with the vendor on your behalf (with you as the principal), or we can work behind the scenes — coaching your procurement team on tactics, talking points, and when to walk away.

Some clients prefer full direct engagement; others want to maintain the vendor relationship themselves and use us as the intelligence layer. We're flexible. What matters is the outcome.

For an initial assessment, we typically need: your current contract and any renewal quote from the vendor, your renewal date, a rough breakdown of which products/services you're using, and your annual software spend.

We don't need full access to your systems or detailed usage logs at the assessment stage — just enough to form a credible savings estimate. Deeper analysis comes once you've decided to proceed.

You can start the conversation here — we'll request only what we need.

We cover the full enterprise software and cloud stack. Our primary vendor specialisations include:

Oracle (EA, ULA, PULA, OCI, Java SE, Fusion Cloud) · Microsoft (EA, MCA-E, Copilot, E3/E5, Azure, Unified Support) · SAP (RISE, S/4HANA, FUE, Digital Access, BTP) · Salesforce (Sales Cloud, Agentforce, MuleSoft, Tableau) · AWS (EDP, Reserved Instances, Savings Plans) · Google Cloud (CUD, Workspace, Gemini) · IBM (ELA, PVU, Cloud Pak, watsonx) · ServiceNow (ELA, Now Assist) · Broadcom/VMware (VCF, vSphere, Horizon) · Workday (per-worker, Adaptive Planning).

Beyond these, we cover 50+ additional vendors for multi-vendor engagements and SaaS contract negotiation. If you have a vendor, we probably have experience with them.

Yes. Software audits — whether from Oracle LMS, SAP STAR, Microsoft MAST, or a BSA/Flexera third-party audit — are a core part of our practice. Our software audit defence service operates on the same gainshare basis: we reduce your compliance exposure and you pay 25% of the reduction.

Vendors use audits as a revenue tool, not a compliance tool. The initial claim is almost always overstated. Our audit defence team has resolved over $200M in compliance exposure for enterprise clients, typically achieving settlements at 20-40% of the initial claim.

Yes. Our cloud cost negotiation service covers Enterprise Discount Programmes (EDP), Reserved Instance strategies, Committed Use Discounts (CUDs), and enterprise agreement renegotiations for AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

Cloud costs are rarely optimised at the vendor level — most FinOps work focuses on resource rightsizing, which is good but incomplete. We go after the commercial terms: the EDP discount tier, the MACC commitment structure, the private pricing agreements. Those negotiations deliver 15-30% reductions independent of resource optimisation.

It's genuinely free. We review your contracts, estimate the savings opportunity, and tell you honestly whether we think we can deliver meaningful value. We don't charge for that assessment, and you're under no obligation to engage us.

The "catch" is our self-interest: we only earn money if we save you money. So we're motivated to assess honestly. If we don't see a compelling savings case, we'll tell you — because taking you on and delivering nothing helps nobody.

Six weeks is tight but workable for most engagements. For Oracle and SAP, you'd want 10+ weeks ideally — but even compressed engagements yield meaningful results when the alternative is signing the vendor's first offer.

We've run emergency engagements in under 3 weeks for clients facing imminent auto-renewals. Contact us immediately — the earlier we start, the more we can do.

Yes, and often the most impactful engagement is stepping in mid-negotiation. If you've been trading proposals with Oracle or Microsoft for two months and you're stuck, a cold outside expert changes the dynamic.

We'd need to understand where you are in the process and what's been agreed so far before confirming we can add value. In most cases we can.

Typically your CPO, CFO, or Head of IT Procurement leads the engagement. We also work closely with your vendor relationship manager, legal team, and IT leadership where relevant.

We don't need a large internal team — just the right decision-makers accessible during key negotiation moments. We run the analysis, develop the strategy, and handle the vendor dialogue. Your team provides context, approvals, and the final signature.

Traditional advisory firms charge retainers of $20,000-$80,000 per month regardless of outcome. You pay whether they save you $5M or zero. Their incentive is to extend the engagement, not to close savings fast.

With NoSaveNoPay, you pay 25% of what we actually deliver. If the engagement takes 6 weeks instead of 6 months, everyone wins. Our incentive is to maximise verified savings and close quickly — which is exactly aligned with what you want.

See our detailed comparison on the pricing page.

Possibly — but almost certainly not to the same depth. Here's why: your procurement team has one Oracle negotiation every 3-5 years. We do dozens per year. We know exactly which discount thresholds exist, which sales rep tactics to push back on, and which quarter-end dynamics create leverage.

Oracle's EA renewal team negotiates enterprise contracts every day. Without equivalent depth of knowledge, you're negotiating blind. The average enterprise overpays by 20-40% on software contracts — that's the cost of the information asymmetry. We close that gap.

SAM tools tell you what you have. They don't negotiate better prices for it. SAM is about compliance visibility — ensuring you're properly licensed. That's valuable but separate from commercial negotiation.

In fact, we often work alongside a client's SAM programme: their SAM tool identifies the licensing position, and we use that data to build the negotiation argument. The two are complementary.