I went through a similar byzantine process years ago when vetting a customer-data platform. Our CEO was an acquaintance of someone at Blueconic, so they had to

I went through a similar byzantine process years ago when vetting a customer-data platform. Our CEO was an acquaintance of someone at Blueconic, so they had to be in the running. They were super-opaque -- unwilling to even give me a range of prices after multiple calls, even after giving them reams of data that represented the traffic/usage we could expect. They were constantly angling to get more senior executives roped into calls and to show demos of features we'd never use. They were also super-reluctant to give us names of references and wanted to moderate such a call. We asked for 3 references and they gave us 1, like David Brent in The UK Office, when his boss asked him for 5 things he did to cut costs and he said "I'll give you 3, and if you want 2 more I'll do that." The other companies were better but still took real effort to extract information. We ended up going with Segment.