Posted December 3, 2025
And all relevant free coverage to date has been taken down as of today.
This was a painful decision to make, the most painful decision the doctor has ever had to make regarding SI, but one where he has no choice but to make it (as the only alternative is to shut SI down, which might still happen, but at least not today).
Additional details are below, but for those who just want a quick summary, here are the five key points that summarize what led to this:
- SI has dealt with too many vendors in the past year that do not adhere to its policies of openness, honesty, and mutual respect.
- A significant number of these vendors have wasted a lot of the doctor‘s time and left both him, and you, with nothing for it.
- The behaviour of some of these vendors is so concerning that the doctor cannot recommend them with a clear conscience or even leave any existing coverage up on SI, as coverage on SI is an implicit recommendation of the vendor (as per the FAQ) as a provider of a solid solution that the doctor believes will honestly try to serve its customers.
- the doctor does not give bad product/platform reviews or call out bad actors (and only calls out marketing/public statements that are misleading, deceitful, or outright false — i.e. he will only attack their public claims) — it could just be one or two bad apples at the vendor who will be gone within a year or two (as most move on to their next job before their lies and bad actions catch up with them) — and taking down just a handful of posts would be calling them out.
- The bad actions * of about 1/5 of the vendors SI has dealt with over the past year have collectively cost SI significantly. It is critical to remember that:
- the doctor DOES NOT make any money off of SI# (as he does not charge readers, did not charge vendors for coverage, and no longer takes sponsorship)
- the doctor has been essentially DONATING 40% of a normal working week to SI for the past two years (as that was the time required to do an average of 3 vendor reviews and 18 other articles a month)
- this donation time does not include the eight-plus (8+) weeks of time lost when vendors don’t schedule necessary follow up demos, return fact checks, or believe the doctor when he says the demo is free and then insist upon customized reprint right/services contracts for their consideration before follow-up demos or fact-checks are returned — so when that adds up to months of time, there’s not enough hours left to make a living (when he has to scramble to write more articles, do more research, or cover other vendors to fill gaps in the daily publication schedule).
Quick Summary Ends Here
Up until 2016 (when the doctor joined Spend Matters as Lead Consulting Analyst until 2023), maybe 1 vendor interaction a year would lead to wasted time and a piece that couldn’t be published and the success rate was 98 or 99 out of 100. This year, the success rate was 4/5. In other words, 1/5 vendors (significantly) wasted my time. Vendors have collectively wasted at least eight (8) weeks of time from bad actions*. Add that to the thirteen (13) standard work weeks that were effectively donated to you to provide free education and insight and to vendors (who might not have another avenue) to get their message out, and that’s twenty-one (21) standard work weeks without revenue. Moreover, from the remaining twenty-nine (29) weeks (leaving only two weeks vacation), you still have to dedicate 30% to business development and overhead, and that leaves twenty weeks that might see revenue (and might is the operative word since non-compete requirements from bad actors not only cost that revenue, but other opportunities as well). It’s well beyond unsustainable!
(the doctor can sustain himself on 39 weeks, which means that he can afford to dedicate up to 13 weeks on SI for free market education as the doctor works an average of fifty-plus [50+] hours a week, and those ten-plus (10+) extra hours are for the business development and overhead so that the one week a month on SI can be maintained.)
* The bad actions range from:
- refusal to schedule follow up demos/answer additional questions (after an initial demo and coverage outline are completed) that results in a few hours of loss
- refusal to return/verify fact checks after a complete write up, and corresponding reprint/advisory contract at the vendor’s request [that was never asked for and not required for coverage], that results in two days of loss (and right now the doctor is sitting on 7 unpublished mostly complete write-ups just from this year — two weeks of waste right here!)
- asking for multiple revisions on a contract/project plan over weeks, and then completely ghosting SI (when the vendor obviously had zero intention of pursuing and should have just said not interested now after the first proposal and discussion) (well over a week of waste right here, only counting revisions because initial asks are standard business development effort)
- cancelling (multi-stage) projects just before the delivery date/initial presentation of the first phase (and then, because they cancelled/refused it, refusing to pay for the first stage) (two projects alone add up to over a month)
- not even bothering to give proper notice of intent to cancel a contract at the end of the first phase (and simply not paying) (no lost time, but lost income due to failure to make a guaranteed payment without proper notice AND non-compete requirements until that date)
So at this point it should be clear that:
- SI is in the situation that it can’t continue offering vendors a free service if 20% of them are going to waste time that SI does not have (and refuse to show any respect for the generous offer of time that was made)
- SI is also in the situation where it can’t recommend a number of these vendors with a clear conscience (and if they had prior coverage, which is an implicit recommendation, leave that coverage up), but
- SI can’t remove just some postings and essentially target just some vendors as that not only violates its impartiality policy, but punishes the vendor as a whole when it might just be a few bad people that will either leave when their bad actions catch up with them or be forced out when their (lack of) business ethics come(s) to light
- SI can’t charge new vendors for coverage if it leaves up relevant free coverage of existing vendors, because why should some vendors pay and not others?
Hence another tough decision had to be made, and since it seems the only thing that these bad apples understand is money^, then that’s the decision, and policy, SI is forced to make. This means that not only all must all free coverage come to an end, but any relevant coverage in the last few years must be taken down as well. (The majority of coverage from the doctor‘s pre-Spend Matters days will stay up as most of those vendors are gone, and most of the remaining coverage is too outdated to be of any use beyond a point in time assessment to determine how far the vendor has come, provided you have recent coverage.)
But since SI still wants to help the 4/5 vendors who are open, honest, respectful, and coming to SI with a desire to help companies and clients succeeds, it’s not going to charge Big Analyst Firm rates. It’s setting the fees at an amount that is just enough to cover the time the effort requires. And will endeavour to maintain the fees at this rate, adjusted for inflation/operational cost increases, for as long as SI has already been in existence.
Moreover, unlike the big analyst firms that only grant one year, these fees will grant two year reprint rights and ensure the coverage can be found on SI for two years as well! The goal is that a startup can get what it needs to get started for 1/10 of a Big Analyst Firm quote and some dedicated analyst time for 1/5 of what the Big Analyst Firm will charge. Enough so that the vendors understand that time is valuable and you should respect whatever time you are getting, but not so much that they can’t afford it (even if the time is worth much more). (Prices are quite low and can be found on the public pricing page.)
Finally, DEMOS WILL REMAIN FREE as they always have been. It’s just that, from now on, there is no write-up without the up-front purchase of a reprint. the doctor will spend the hour he needs to get the insight he needs to properly position you on recommendation lists when people ask who does X well and would be suited for me, but that will be the only free time you get as a vendor from now on.
# If you have the time, ask yourself how many of the influencers you follow every single day are truly doing it for free and, more importantly, will continue doing it if some of you don’t give them your money. When you sign up for a newsletter, how long before you get a “Special offer: act now and get my entire archive of templates for 50% off” or “My online training course for you, as a subscriber, is only $99.99!“. Seriously. the doctor follows a lot of the modern Linked-In content generators … and he can tell you that not a month, if not a week, goes by where, if you are paying attention, they are asking you to buy something from them and it’s a guarantee that if not enough of you do, they’ll go away and take all their content with them.
Now ask yourself the last time the doctor asked you to buy his course, his training archive, or pay for the private articles, or donate to his site. While doing that, go back through the entire 19.5 years of public history (which is now about 6,500 articles). Try to find one instance he asked you, dear reader, to pay. And then, when you get exhausted, give up. Because you won’t find one. the doctor has been intent on helping you understand what you need and, professionally, on helping companies do better — usually vendors who want to build better solutions, but occasionally buying organizations who want to find the right fit technology for them!.
! the doctor must admit that given the current state of the vendor ecosystem, this may be his main focus professionally going forward. Specifically, educating buying organizations on not only how to assess technology, but assess the vendor from a partnership perspective, and working with them to make sure they get it right. Failure rates have reached 88% across the board, and 94% for AI projects. Not only are too many companies selecting the wrong technology, but too many companies selecting the right technology are selecting the wrong vendor. He’s heard directly from, and indirectly about, too many companies where, after the invoice was paid and the system turned on, they were essentially abandoned by the vendor who wouldn’t help them unless they found, and verified, an actual bug in a system they didn’t know how to use! (And then, sometimes, the vendor would demand a mandatory cost increase on the annual license renewal despite not fulfilling their initial promises.) And given his experience with vendors over the past year, he’s inclined to believe every single story! And he finds it both sad and disgusting! If the doctor gets short-changed by a vendor, he loses thousands, maybe tens of thousands. But if you, as a buying organization, get shortchanged, you lose millions. Utterly disgusting!
^Too many vendors still ask the doctor how to get on the radar of a Big Analyst Firm where the sales person says you don’t even get analyst time at 10K+ a day unless you commit to a research package of 30K to 50K or more, 75K or more if you want a guaranteed write-up with a limited one-year re-print right with no renewal included, and over 100K if you want to be sure to get on the map. It’s the wrong question because the vendor can’t afford it, and even if they can somehow scrape together an amount for a minimal engagement, they’re not going to be included in the maps or recommended anyway as the analyst firms have to maintain those high six figure relationships by only recommending the vendors who are on the maps. (The right question is “why do the maps even matter” and the right follow up is “how do we explain to potential customers the maps are leading them down the wrong, dark, rabbit hole they will never escape from“.)
