[Coda]

Ugh. Dealing with a customer with a multi-million dollar contract at work, and they keep yanking our chain. They contracted with us for custom development, argued hard on not taking any risk upon themselves so they didn't pay any money to us up front (and I wasn't allowed to be involved in the negotiations because I'm in engineering, not in sales), and then proceeded to stall for like ten months with various problems with their payment processor, their own engineering team getting caught up in bureaucracy, and then halted their travel program for the holidays. This means we aren't making any revenue at all on that contract until December... and now there's rumbling that the management got replaced on the customer's side and the new management doesn't know if they want to renew the contract for next year.

Meanwhile, upper management on our side is seeing all of these complications and delays and is expressing a desire to terminate the contract now instead of losing any more money. Which is going to suck on multiple levels. It makes my team look bad for sinking so much into a project that died without making any revenue ever. It makes me feel like crap because of how much effort I put into this that isn't panning out.

And I've got a lot of "I told you so"'s here, too, because I was arguing for some sort of guaranteed revenue in the contract instead of being fees only. Maybe charge $X/month and then offer the first N bookings per month for free, or maybe have a basic support fee and then lower the marginal fees a bit. But that didn't happen.