I get it that it takes someone's time, but i will never believe that it takes more than 10 min to confirm the details. Especially if there is a clear form, on their website, with all the details they ever need to see. If they have some paper documents to support that, that's another 10 min. £175 for 20 min of work ? Dream job. And also there is no way they will take a programmers time to do such things, i m sure they have operations/sales department who takes care of that. Which is the job they being paid to do anyway. So such a stupid fee is clearly just to 'milk the cow' as much as they can.
JOPS is right, they could put someone from management to do this and charge 3 times that, simply cause they can.
Also agree, but they should also consider their customers sometimes, who are creating money for them, and eventually will leave them, if things like this will keep happening. It wont be all of them, but it might hurt their budgets a bit. Recent decisions put a lot of C4D users against them, I'm seeing a lot of people switching software. A lot of Redshift user doing the same.