In my case I think I could've made my case better but I was tired and lazy. It was me against one director where it could pay a few hundred bucks to have all the features it wanted or have me implement a single must have feature on top of the community edition.
It's difficult to judge because maybe the project had a hard budget so even if having me implement things resulted in a costlier and possibly worse result it made more sense due to not resulting in a new discretionary cost. But I think it was more due to cultural background where the person was used to not pay much for software. My experience working with CEO was the opposite, those kinds of costs were pre-approved.
