Even 30 days is useless for me with my schedule on some items. Some of the optimization solvers are annoying that way if you're trying to get a proof of concept

Even 30 days is useless for me with my schedule on some items. Some of the optimization solvers are annoying that way if you're trying to get a proof of concept together to get management buy-in, but it'll take a lot of development to get there. You can use one of the generic libraries that abstracts away the solver (where you can plug most vendors in) and start with an open source option, but it's an annoying approach if I think there's a strong chance we'll end up with a particular vendor as I'd want to use their native API and avoid the additional abstraction layer. I totally understand why it makes sense to the business, it's just hard to work it in to my schedule. Another thing for these companies to think about is a potential customer is investing their own time in learning your product. They may not act on it right away, but I've been in situations where we had an "oh crap" moment and I was able to say go get product X, I know it works on our data sets and already have example scripts for how we can use it and the vendor indicated a price of Y last year which is like 1/5 the cost this other vendor just quoted you to start implementing this from scratch. Allowing employees some creativity to scratch that itch seems to constantly pay off in my experience as long as they're still being successful at their main job.