Read-alike guide
Books Like Before the Coffee Gets Cold
People who type this query want one of two different things, and every list serves one while pretending to serve both. Decide which reader you are; the tiers below are built for each.
Book Two · The Train Between Worlds
The Memory Fare
A novel of a mother, a missing daughter, and the train that charges in memories.
If the part that stayed with you was the fairness of the rule, stated before you sit down, never bent, and paid anyway, then The Memory Fare is the book on this site to read. Cora Marsh has signed the visitor book at a railway lost-property office every morning for six years, looking for something of her daughter June, who walked out at seventeen after an argument about a phone bill. Then a grey holdall comes in tagged in June’s handwriting, off a service that does not exist, and Cora boards it on purpose. The conductor explains the fare before she can change her mind: every door she opens looking for June costs one true memory of June. She will not feel it go. She will never know which one she paid.
Be clear about what it is not. It is not cosy. There is no café, no regulars, no kind woman pouring coffee, and nobody comes back with a changed heart and the world unchanged. Kawaguchi’s customers pay in futility; Cora pays in June. It is a single journey rather than four linked visits, told close to Cora, about the length of one long evening, and it ends the way the rule says it must rather than the way you would like. Readers who wanted the café’s gentleness should read Ogawa’s Housekeeper instead. Readers who wanted Kei’s chapter, a mother and a daughter and a rule that cannot be argued with, taken all the way down, are the ones this was written for.
A standalone novel — no need to have read Book One
Short answer
If it was the rule — one seat, nothing changes, back before it cools — read The Housekeeper and the Professor first and If Cats Disappeared from the World second. If it was the shelf — a small Japanese place, linked stories, a gatekeeper who knows more than she says — read What You Are Looking For Is in the Library, then The Kamogawa Food Detectives. If it was the fourth story, the one that made you cry, read Sweet Bean Paste. The Midnight Library and The Memory Police are on every other list; this page explains why they leave Kawaguchi readers cold.
What to expect from The Memory Fare
Where it lines up with Kawaguchi, and where it goes somewhere he does not:
- Same as Before the Coffee Gets Cold
- One rule, explained in advance, never bent. A protagonist who accepts a bad bargain because the alternative is doing nothing. A mother and a daughter at the centre, as in Kei’s chapter. Short enough for one sitting.
- Different
- The fare is paid in memory, not in futility: every door costs something and you do not feel it go. One sustained journey, not four linked stories. No café, no gatekeeper who is on your side, and the ending is not softened.
- Tone
- Quiet and devastating rather than gentle. Readers who cried at the café tend to find this one harder, and say so.
- Central question
- If loving someone meant forgetting them, would you still do it?
- Content notes
- A missing child, parental grief, prolonged searching, memory loss chosen rather than suffered. No on-page violence.
- Reading order
- Book Two, written as a standalone; nothing from Book One is needed. Book Three opens in the minute after this one ends.
- Formats
- Kindle and paperback. Free to borrow with Kindle Unlimited, as is Before the Coffee Gets Cold.
Start here: which half of the book did you come for?
Before the Coffee Gets Cold is 224 pages and it is two books stapled together. One is a time-travel premise with a rule. The other is a Tokyo basement café with regulars. Most people loved one of them more.
I loved the rule. One seat, one cup, nothing you do changes the present, and they go back anyway.
You want a constraint that is explained up front, never bent, and paid. That is rarer than time travel and it is what the “same machinery” recommendations get wrong. The Housekeeper and the Professor is the purest version: a memory that lasts eighty minutes, and a family built inside it. If Cats Disappeared from the World makes the bargain explicit, a day of life for a category of thing. Lonely Castle in the Mirror gives the rule hours and a penalty and then does what Kei’s chapter does, at length.
The Housekeeper and the Professor · If Cats Disappeared from the World · Lonely Castle in the Mirror
I loved the café. Kazu, the regulars, the woman in the white dress, the sense that the place was there before the story started.
You want the shelf, and the shelf is deep now. What You Are Looking For Is in the Library has the same architecture exactly: five visitors, one room, one gatekeeper. The Kamogawa Food Detectives swaps coffee for a dish from your past. Days at the Morisaki Bookshop drops the device entirely and keeps the quiet. Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop is the Korean version, and the one to read if you liked the café’s staff more than its customers.
What You Are Looking For Is in the Library · The Kamogawa Food Detectives · Days at the Morisaki Bookshop · Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop
I loved the sadness. Kohtake and the letter, Kei and her daughter. I wanted it gentler and it was not.
Then skip the cats and read Sweet Bean Paste, which is the best-written book on this page and the only one whose grief is historical rather than magical. The Housekeeper and the Professor is the other one that earns its tears. Be warned off The Memory Police, which is sad in a completely different key.
I want more of the same café. Is the series worth continuing, and in what order?
Yes, and in publication order; the FAQ at the bottom goes through it. This page is for when you have finished the six of them, or when the second one told you the trick was going to be the same each time and you wanted the trick done differently.
What Before the Coffee Gets Cold actually is, and why the lists split the wrong way
Before the Coffee Gets Cold began as a play. Toshikazu Kawaguchi staged it in 2010, turned it into a novel in 2015, and Geoffrey Trousselot’s English translation arrived from Picador in 2019. You can still see the stage in it: one set (Funiculi Funicula, a basement café in Tokyo with three clocks that disagree), a cast of about eight, and four acts that are really four customers. Fumiko wants to go back to the conversation where her boyfriend left for America. Kohtake, a nurse, wants a letter her husband wrote before his Alzheimer’s took him. Hirai, who runs a bar, wants her younger sister. Kei, who owns the café and has a weak heart, goes forward instead of back, to see the daughter she will not live to raise.
The rules do the work. You must sit in one seat, and the seat is usually occupied by a woman in a white dress who leaves it once a day. You cannot get up. You can only meet someone who has been to the café. Nothing you do in the past will change the present. And you must drink the coffee before it cools, or you become the woman in the white dress. Every customer knows all of this before they sit down. Every one of them goes anyway, and the book is about why. Terry Hong, reviewing it for the Christian Science Monitor, called the narrative “uneven” and the structure “occasionally repetitive”, and then admitted it had a “surprising, unerring ability to find lasting emotional resonance”. That is the honest review. It is clumsily written in places, the coffee-pouring is described six times, and the fourth story will still take you apart.
The reason read-alike lists fail is that they list by setting. Café, bookshop, cat, Kyoto, done. But two different readers type this query. One came for the shelf: the wave of gentle translated Japanese fiction that Kawaguchi’s book led (it was the best-selling translated novel in Britain in 2022 and again in 2023, and by 2024 Japanese titles were 43% of the top forty translated novels sold there). The other came for the rule: the idea that you can go back, that it will change nothing, and that people do it anyway. The shelf reader is well served and does not need much help. The rule reader gets handed The Midnight Library, which has the opposite rule, and The Memory Police, which has no café and no mercy. Below, the tiers are built by which part of Kawaguchi a book replicates, and the two misfires get their own section.
“At the end of the day, whether one returns to the past or travels to the future, the present doesn’t change.”
Closest: one rule, stated up front, paid anyway
Not cafés. The same engine: a constraint that cannot be argued with, and people who build something inside it.
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The Housekeeper and the Professor
Closest match The ruleA housekeeping agency sends a single mother to a retired mathematician who lives in a cottage behind his sister-in-law’s house. Since a car accident in 1975 his memory has lasted eighty minutes; his suit is covered in notes clipped on with bulldog clips, and the most important one says my memory lasts only 80 minutes. Every morning she introduces herself again. He asks her shoe size, her birthday, and finds the number beautiful. When he learns she has a ten-year-old son he insists the boy come to the cottage after school, and names him Root, for the flat top of his head.
This is Kawaguchi’s rule with the coffee taken out. The clock is fixed, the reset is total, nothing anyone does inside the eighty minutes carries over, and the three of them make a family anyway. It is also, quietly, about prime numbers and the Hanshin Tigers, and it is the book that won the very first Japan Booksellers’ Award, the prize that later went to Lonely Castle in the Mirror. Kirkus called it “simple story, well told”, which undersells the ending. Ogawa also wrote The Memory Police; this is the one to read first, and by a distance the warmer.
- How it ends
- His window shrinks further, he goes into a care home, and the visits continue; the last pages are about a baseball card.
- Contains
- Cognitive decline in an older man, shown gently; A sister-in-law who assumes the worst of the housekeeper
- Skip if
- Skip it if you need a supernatural device; the eighty minutes are medical, not magic.
Checked against: Kirkus review, Wikipedia: publication, the Booksellers’ Award, film
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If Cats Disappeared from the World
Closest match The ruleA postman is told he has a brain tumour and very little time. That evening the Devil turns up in the postman’s own body wearing a Hawaiian shirt, so the postman calls him Aloha, and offers a deal: one more day of life for every category of thing he agrees to remove from the world. Phones go first, and with them the ex-girlfriend he only ever spoke to by phone. Then films, and the friend who worked at the video shop. Then clocks, and his father the watchmaker. Then Aloha asks for cats, and the narrator’s cat, Cabbage, was his dead mother’s.
It is the most explicit version of the Kawaguchi bargain in print: the rule is named in chapter one, the cost is stated each time, and each chapter is a visit to someone the narrator should have spoken to. It is written as a letter to his estranged father, which tells you where it is going. Kirkus was unkind (“Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not”), and the prose is plain to the point of thin; the Japan Society’s reviewer called it “a beautiful story that each of us should read”. Both are right. It was filmed in 2016. Read it in an evening, and read it before the book on this site.
- How it ends
- He refuses the last trade, accepts the arithmetic, and spends the time he has left going to see his father.
- Contains
- Terminal illness, faced from the first page; A mother’s death, recalled; The disappearance of cats is proposed, not carried out
- Skip if
- Skip it if you want prose to admire; this is a fable in plain clothes.
Checked against: Kirkus review (Flatiron edition), Japan Society review (Picador edition, 200 pp), Wikipedia: the order of disappearances, the 2016 film
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Lonely Castle in the Mirror
Closest match The ruleKokoro has stopped going to school. In May her bedroom mirror starts to glow, and on the other side is a castle on an island, six other children who have also stopped going to school, and a small girl in a wolf mask who explains the terms. The castle is open from nine to five. Somewhere in it is a key; whoever finds it gets one wish, and then all seven of them will forget the place ever existed. On 30 March it closes for good. Anyone still inside at five o’clock is eaten. The chapters are months, May to March, and the deadline sits on every page.
The rule is the Kawaguchi rule with a penalty attached, and Tsujimura uses it the way Kawaguchi uses Kei’s chapter: for a reveal about when the seven of them are from, which is why they have never met at the school they all attend. It won the Japan Booksellers’ Award in 2018 and became an anime in 2022. It is also nearly twice the length of the café, in a young-adult register, and the middle sags. Readers who wanted Kawaguchi’s brevity will feel the length; readers who wanted his last thirty pages done properly will forgive it.
- How it ends
- The wish is spent on the others rather than on herself, and the reunion happens outside the castle, where it can be kept.
- Contains
- School bullying, including a scene of a classmate at the door; Truancy and social withdrawal treated seriously; One child is seriously ill
- Skip if
- Skip it if 384 pages of thirteen-year-olds is a hard no; the payoff is real but it is at the end.
Checked against: Penguin UK edition: 384 pp, publication, Wikipedia: plot, the Booksellers’ Award, the anime, Tony’s Reading List review
Strong: the shelf the café sits on
These are the books the query is usually answered with, and they are the right answer for the reader who came for the place rather than the premise. Tiered here by how much of Kawaguchi’s shape they keep.
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What You Are Looking For Is in the Library
Strong match The shelfThe closest structural twin to the café on this page, and there is no magic in it at all. Five people at a bad moment (a shop assistant of twenty-one, an accounts clerk who wants an antiques shop, a magazine editor sidelined after maternity leave, an unemployed illustrator, a man of sixty-five on the first day of retirement) end up at the library of the Hatori Community House. The librarian, Sayuri Komachi, is enormous and does not smile. She asks what they are looking for, types a list, adds one book nobody asked for, and hands over a small felted object. That is the whole device.
It has Kawaguchi’s architecture exactly: one room, one gatekeeper, five linked visits, and an ending for each that is a change of heart rather than a change of circumstance. It placed second for the Japan Booksellers’ Award and made TIME’s hundred must-reads for 2023; Robin Sloan in the New York Times called it an “undeniable page-turner”, the Straits Times called it “soppily sentimental”, and you will know within ten pages which of them you agree with. If you liked the café’s regulars more than its rule, this is the one.
- How it ends
- Each of the five ends with a decision made, and the last story closes the loop on the first; no one is rescued, everyone is nudged.
- Skip if
- Skip it if you wanted the supernatural; Komachi is only very good at her job.
Checked against: Kirkus review, Wikipedia: award placing, TIME list, reception
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The Kamogawa Food Detectives
Strong match The shelfNagare Kamogawa, a retired detective, and his daughter Koishi run a diner in Kyoto with no sign on the door and a one-line advertisement in a food magazine that gives no address. People find it anyway. What they want is not lunch but a dish they cannot get back: the nabeyaki udon a dead wife made, a mackerel sushi from a childhood town, a tonkatsu from a first date. Koishi takes the statement; Nagare disappears for a fortnight and comes back with the dish, and with the story of why it tasted like that.
The rule here is procedural rather than magical (two weeks, no address, one dish), which is why it works for Kawaguchi readers who liked the bureaucracy of the seat as much as the time travel. Kirkus was honest that the six stories follow a “predictable formula” and still called the book “nourishing”. Kashiwai was a dentist in Kyoto for decades and it shows in the best way: the detail is local and exact, down to the cat, Drowsy, who is not allowed in. There are four in English now, and they are all the same book, which is either the point or the problem.
- How it ends
- Every story ends with the dish served and the client changed a little; the diner does not.
- Skip if
- Skip it if you want the rule to cost something; here it only costs the wait.
Checked against: Kirkus review, Penguin Random House: edition, author biography
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Sweet Bean Paste
Strong match The sadnessSentaro fries dorayaki in a small shop under a cherry tree, working off a debt to the owner’s widow, using bean paste from a tub. Tokue, seventy-six, with hands twisted into claws, asks for the job; he refuses; she leaves him a sample of her own paste, and it is better than anything he has tasted. She makes it by listening to the beans. The queue grows. Then the customers find out where Tokue spent the last fifty years, and why, and the queue goes away.
This is the one to read if the fourth chapter of the café is what stayed with you. The grief is not supernatural: Tokue was sent to a Hansen’s disease sanatorium at fourteen under a law Japan only repealed in 1996, and the book is about what a life confined like that is worth, asked by a woman who has decided it was worth a great deal. The Japan Times called its movement “slow, muted” and the whole thing “a subtle, moving exploration of redemption in an unforgiving society”. Naomi Kawase filmed it in 2015 and took it to Cannes. It is the best-written book on this page and the one with the least to apologise for.
- How it ends
- Tokue dies of pneumonia in the sanatorium; her letter and a cassette she leaves are the last pages, and they are why people recommend it.
- Contains
- Historical forced confinement of leprosy patients, described plainly; A death from illness; Sentaro’s past includes prison and drinking
- Skip if
- Skip it if you came for the café’s lightness; this is the heaviest book here and does not pretend otherwise.
Checked against: Wikipedia: plot, the sanatorium, the Kawase film, The Bookbag review (Oneworld, 224 pp)
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Days at the Morisaki Bookshop
Strong match The shelfTakako’s boyfriend tells her, over dinner, that he is marrying someone else, and adds that he hopes they can stay friends at work. She quits, sleeps for a month, and takes up her uncle Satoru’s offer of the room above his second-hand bookshop in Jimbocho, the Tokyo district that is nothing but second-hand bookshops. She has never read a book for pleasure. There are boxes of them on the floor. The first half is her learning to; the second half is Satoru’s wife, Momoko, walking back in after five years away with no explanation.
There is no device at all, and that is the recommendation. Readers who loved the café more than the chair, the sound of the place before a customer sits down, will find that Yagisawa has written that and nothing else. It was his first book, sat on Japanese bestseller lists for months in 2010, was filmed the same year, and Ozawa’s 2023 translation was shortlisted for a British Book Award. It is a hundred and sixty pages, an afternoon, and the second half is better than the first.
- How it ends
- Takako leaves the shop for a job and a life; Momoko’s reason for leaving turns out to be an illness, and Satoru is told.
- Contains
- A callous breakup; A cancer diagnosis, in the second half
- Skip if
- Skip it if you need a rule or a reveal; nothing here is impossible except the amount of reading Takako gets done.
Checked against: Wikipedia: publication, plot, sequel, British Book Awards shortlist, Guardian (via GIGAZINE summary): the Japanese fiction boom this book rode
Loose: the one the shelf will hand you next
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Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop
Looser match The shelfYeongju burns out of a career and a marriage, sells the flat, and opens a bookshop in a residential corner of Seoul she picks because the first syllable of the name means rest. She hires Minjun, who has failed to get hired anywhere else, to make coffee. A roaster called Jimi, a writer called Seungwoo and a teenager called Mincheol drift in. Nobody time-travels, nobody dies, and everybody is, as one reviewer put it, “better off by the end”.
It is here because it is the book Kawaguchi readers are handed next in every bookshop, and because it works for exactly one of the two readers this page is for. If the café’s staff were your favourite part, Yeongju and Minjun are that, at length. If the rule was, there is nothing here for you; the LIBER Review called it “formulaic and clichéd”, and the self-help register (the perfect coffee, the right way to rest) is louder than anything in Kawaguchi. It began as a prize-winning e-book in Korea in 2022 and was a phenomenon there.
- How it ends
- Everyone stays or leaves on better terms than they arrived; the shop is still open.
- Skip if
- Skip it if a book telling you how to live makes you want to do the opposite.
Checked against: LIBER Review (Young Kim), Goodreads: edition and reception
At a glance: each book against the café
Three questions that decide whether a book will work after Kawaguchi. “Is there a rule?” means a stated constraint the characters cannot bend.
| Book | Is there a rule? | Does it cost anything? | Length | Warmth |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Before the Coffee Gets Cold | Yes, five of them | The present stays the same | 224 pp | High, with one cold chapter |
| The Housekeeper and the Professor | Eighty minutes | Every day starts over | 192 pp | High |
| If Cats Disappeared from the World | A day for a category | The world, one thing at a time | 200 pp | Plain, sincere |
| Lonely Castle in the Mirror | Nine to five, one wish | Everyone forgets | 384 pp | High, slow to arrive |
| What You Are Looking For Is in the Library | No | Nothing | 320 pp | Very high |
| The Kamogawa Food Detectives | Two weeks, no address | The wait | 208 pp | High |
| Sweet Bean Paste | No | A life, already paid | 224 pp | Deep, grave |
| Days at the Morisaki Bookshop | No | Nothing | 160 pp | Gentle |
| Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop | No | Nothing | 320 pp | Warm, instructive |
| The Midnight Library | Try any life, leave when it fails | Nothing until the last chapter | 288 pp | Warm, with a thesis |
| The Memory Police | Things vanish; remembering is a crime | Everything, slowly | 274 pp | Cold |
Page counts are for the English editions named in the sources; paperbacks vary.
Counterweights: the two you will be told to read
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The Midnight Library
The counterweight The rule, invertedNora Seed, who has lost her job, her cat and her brother’s goodwill in one day, takes an overdose and wakes at midnight in a library that goes on forever. The librarian is Mrs Elm, from her school. Every book is a life she could have lived if she had made one choice differently: the swimmer, the rock star, the glaciologist, the woman married to a doctor called Ash. She may try any of them, and she leaves each the moment she feels disappointment. The Book of Regrets is there for consultation.
It is on this page because it is the second most-recommended book for this query and because the comparison is clarifying. Kawaguchi’s people go back knowing they can change nothing, and the book is about why they go. Haig’s heroine can change everything, repeatedly, and the book is about learning that she should not want to. That is a lesson, and it is delivered as one. Natasha Pulley in the Guardian found the reflections “overly simplistic”; it also sold seven hundred thousand copies in Britain alone and won the Goodreads Choice Award, so plenty of readers wanted the lesson. If you were one of them, read it. If the café’s refusal to explain itself was the point, you will find this book explaining itself a great deal.
- How it ends
- The library burns, Nora chooses her original life, and the last pages are a list of what she is grateful for.
- Contains
- A suicide attempt in the opening chapters; Depression, discussed throughout
- Skip if
- Skip it if you wanted the rule to hold; here the rule is that you may try again.
Checked against: Wikipedia: plot, sales, reception, NPR review (Jason Sheehan)
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The Memory Police
The counterweight The rule, without mercyOn an unnamed island, things disappear. One morning it is ribbons; the islanders wake, feel a gap, gather up every ribbon they own and burn them, and by evening cannot say what a ribbon was. Then birds. Then roses. The Memory Police search houses for anyone who still remembers, and take them away. The narrator, a novelist, learns that her editor R is one of the people who cannot forget, and builds him a room under her floor. Then novels disappear, and she goes on writing anyway, in a language that is leaving.
Ogawa wrote it in 1994; Stephen Snyder’s translation arrived in 2019 and was shortlisted for the International Booker and the National Book Award. It is a great novel, and it is on every list for this query for a bad reason: it is Japanese and it has memory in the title. What it does not have is a small warm place, a gatekeeper, a customer, or a single moment of consolation. Kirkus called it “a quiet tale”, which it is, but the quiet is the quiet of things being removed. Readers who cried at Kohtake’s letter will not find that here. Readers who wanted the rule taken to its end, with nothing held back, will.
- How it ends
- The disappearances reach the body, and then the narrator; R comes up from under the floor into a world that has forgotten itself.
- Contains
- Totalitarian surveillance and arrests; Bodily loss described calmly; A hidden man for most of the book
- Skip if
- Skip it if what you loved about the café was that it was kind. Nothing on this island is.
Checked against: Kirkus review, Wikipedia: publication history, prizes, adaptation
“I was so absorbed in the things that I couldn’t change, I forgot the most important thing.”
The book on this site takes the same rule (you cannot change what happened) and adds a second one: the trip costs you something you will not feel leaving. That is the honest difference, and it is why the next section is not going to call it cosy.
Where this page’s facts come from
- Wikipedia: Before the Coffee Gets Cold — Publication history, the play, the rules, the film, the six-book series.
- Christian Science Monitor review (Terry Hong, Nov 2020) — The four stories by name, the rules, and the “uneven” verdict quoted above.
- Book Marks: all reviews of Before the Coffee Gets Cold — Chicago Review of Books, Publishers Weekly and Bookreporter excerpts.
- Pan Macmillan: a guide to the series — Series order, Cafe Donna Donna, the rules as the publisher states them.
- Goodreads: Toshikazu Kawaguchi quotes — Both quotations on this page, verified against the translation’s wording.
- GIGAZINE summary of the Guardian’s “Surrealism, cafes and lots (and lots) of cats” (Nov 2024) — The Nielsen figures: 25% of UK translated fiction in 2022, over 40% of the top forty in 2024.
- PopMatters: Healing fiction from Japan and South Korea (Fincher, Riley, Blumberg-Kason, Apr 2025) — The best critical account of the shelf, including what it leaves out.
- Book Riot: 8 books like Before the Coffee Gets Cold (Jul 2024) — The list this page is arguing with.
FAQ
What order should I read the Before the Coffee Gets Cold books in?
Publication order, which is also story order: Before the Coffee Gets Cold, Tales from the Cafe, Before Your Memory Fades (which moves to a sister café, Donna Donna, on a hillside in Hakodate), Before We Say Goodbye, Before We Forget Kindness, and Before I Knew I Loved You, the sixth, published in English in 2026. Each has four visitors and the same rules. The second is the one to test yourself on: if the trick still works on you there, the rest will; if it felt like the same book again, this page is for you.
Is Before the Coffee Gets Cold on Kindle Unlimited?
Yes, in the US catalogue at the time of writing, which surprises people; it is one of the few translated bestsellers that is. Of the books on this page, The Memory Fare is also in Kindle Unlimited. The Midnight Library and The Memory Police are not. The rest rotate, so check before you assume. The site’s Kindle Unlimited literary fiction guide keeps a longer list.
Is there a book like Before the Coffee Gets Cold but with higher stakes?
The café’s rule is that nothing you do in the past changes the present, which is what keeps it gentle: the cost is futility. Books that keep the single clean rule and let it cost something real are If Cats Disappeared from the World (a day of life for a category of thing), Lonely Castle in the Mirror (one wish, then everyone forgets) and, on this site, The Memory Fare, where every door a mother opens looking for her daughter costs one true memory of her. None of the three is cosy. All three are honest about the price.
This is the sentence that gets quoted, and it is worth noticing that it is not consoling. It is a limit. The books in the closest tier are the ones that take a limit like this seriously, tell you what it costs, and then let their people pay.