Im not privy to billing discussions unfortunately. I know how we get the certs; we just tell our contact that we need a long cert for X machine, and 2-3 days later, it shows up in our email.

It's a pain,but we have only 14 machines we oversee, with 3 year certs on each. Nagios takes care of alerts within 60 days, so we can easily get the request in time.