Apple Business Manager - can a vendor charge for enrollment?

Hi Apple, asking publicly since it may help also others:

We are a large organization dispersed across 30 European jurisdictions, trying to onboard Apple Business Manager; so far we managed to assign a batch of devices in one country, and it was done completely free of charge, even for the previous purchases made last year.

We’ve ran into a situation, where our branch office in Paris, France bought some 100 iPhones and asked their vendor, telecom company Bouygues, to enroll devices into ABM. Vendor requested a charge of almost 1000 EUR for making this happen.

Is this something that Apple permits resellers to do, ie. charge business clients for enrolling the devices into ABM? Doesn’t seem quite fair, to be honest, and it was never mentioned in the documentation I was able to find; to the contrary, it is always stated that ABM is "free of charge" for the client.

Deployment Support team replied to my email with vague "we'd need to refer you directly to the Reseller to discuss their pricing, as they are independently owned businesses, Apple would not know their services charges". Which is something I understand, but the service charges might be governed by the clauses or general terms of ABM partner contract between resellers and Apple.

I'm committed to raise this as high with Apple as it takes to get some official statement. So far I'm getting some IT managers disappointed by different understanding of "free of charge" statement.

Kindest regards,

Adam

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