The problem with two reasonable numbers
Two vendors, two proposals, both credible, one cheaper. The instinct is to treat the difference as efficiency. It almost never is.
Scope is invisible in a total. One proposal priced the exception path, the reconciliation, and a month of tuning after launch. The other priced the path where everything goes right, and will meet the rest as change requests. Neither is lying. They are describing different jobs, and the totals hide which is which.
Five questions, none about price
What baseline did you measure, and how? A vendor who cannot say where the current number came from will be free to invent the comparison later, when the project needs a result. The before figure has to exist before the after does, which is the whole argument in what a process audit must produce.
What is the build plus twelve months of running? Usage at your real volume, hosting, monitoring, and the hours a person spends each month on whatever the workflow hands back. That last item is missing from most quotes and is often the biggest. One sum, and most of these decisions resolve themselves - the same arithmetic that reading a quote is built on.
What would you refuse to build for us? The useful answer is specific: a decision that should stay with a person, a data source too unreliable to sit under a workflow, a step whose volume does not repay the work. A vendor who would build all of it has looked at your budget rather than at your process.
Who owns the code and the keys? Where it lives, who can read it, whose accounts hold the credentials, and what you have on the Monday after you stop paying. Cheap to agree now, unpleasant to discover later.
What happens when an integration changes shape? Every workflow depends on somebody else's release schedule. The good answer names how a silent change would be caught, which is a question worth asking before the build rather than after the first bad month.
What the answers are actually measuring
All five cost the vendor something to answer honestly. That is the point. A price is free to state and free to be wrong about; a refusal, an ownership clause and a running figure in writing are commitments, and commitments sort vendors in a way totals cannot.
When both answer well
Then you have a real choice rather than a trap, and the remaining differences - sequence, who is in the room, how change is priced - are ones you are qualified to judge. Choose the one whose refusal list you agree with. That list is the closest thing available to a preview of how they will behave when something goes wrong, which it will.
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