A good deal of what we have to pay for to run our company's infrastructure is based on volume. We pay for the volume or capacity of internet bandwidth we have. We pay for the number of physical phone lines we have coming into our building. We pay rates on all the credit card transactions we do based on volume.

As a business consumer I want and need these types of pricing models. If I need more bandwidth to host streaming video I'm happy to pay for it to ensure that my customers have a good experience when they are using our websites. I know that I can adjust our costs up and down based on the volume of a service we require as a business. This is nice because I only pay for what I am using, nothing more nothing less.

As a technologist, I know that the services I buy cost the service providers to manage. If I buy more phone lines, the phone company needs to install more physical circuits. If I buy more bandwidth the service provider has to either purchase more bandwidth to cover my allocation or have less to sell to other customers. In the end I know that my volume purchasing decision has real cost impacts to the vendors which is why they offer volume based pricing in the first place to ensure that they stay profitable when demand goes up or down.

I am working with a vendor that has sold us a product with a volume based pricing plan. This is a software vendor and we are running into an issue where the actual volume we need may drastically overrun our initial budgets. Our bad for sure.

The problem I have is that there is no additional cost associated with the increase in volume to the vendor. It is a self-hosted program, on our servers using our bandwidth and nothing is getting transferred to the vendor. There is no change in their cost if we process 1 item through their system or 1 million. The cost is all contained on our end support their software.

Is there anywhere else in the technology industry that this sort of behavior is acceptable?