Sometimes you just gotta hit em upside their head to make them understand, copies are not FREE for you, why do they expect not to have to pay for them? 

We recently decided to go "paperless" as much as possible.  I have instructed my abstractors to provide me with only the references to those documents that are available on line and to provide me with copies of the documents that must be retrieved directly from the court file (remembering that we do a lot of REO and foreclosure work).  I do not expect that my abstractor should have to pay the clerk a copy fee and not be able to bill me for those copies, and even to add a small fee for his/her time in retrieval, within reason). I don't have extra money to subsidize any of my vendor's costs and I fully believe that none of my vendors can afford to subsidize my costs.  As a point in fact, copy fees are a "pass through" fee that is allowed, as long as you don't overinflate you actual cost.  Why would a vendor not pay those fees?