I've been plotting / planning my building for a few months now. I started with the enclosed metal carport option expecting it to be least cost and it came out to about $21 per sq ft. After getting tired of dealing with those companies, I looked in to metal sheaved pole buildings and found that the exact same building comes out to about $24 per sq ft. About a $3k difference for what I've got planned.

Some generalized observations:

Very few metal buildings are actually sold directly by the manufacturer. Most seem to use an independent dealer model which results in 10 different web sites actually selling the same product. I also highly suspect that if you buy from company A in say TX, they'll resell the job to company B in say VA because it cuts down on delivery cost. Not necessarily a terrible thing as ya pretty much end up with the same building but seems at least a bit shady in the way it's marketed. I've also had varying results with different resellers of the same building. One outfit that was trying to close my job before the end of the quarter resorted to bad mouthing the other vendor I was considering. The other anxiety is playing russian roulette with the install team they send out which are also independent contractors.

Pole buildings seem to be generally erected by the company you bought them from. They may be all following the same blue print but there is something to be said for dealing with one local-ish company vs rando middlemen. In general, they've been striking me as a lot less sleazy than the metal building outfits.

Metal building companies want absolutely nothing to do with your building permit, site prep, or concrete floor. They just want to take the order, ship the cookie cutter parts and send out the nearest contractor to put it up. If you know what you're doing, not a completely terrible thing and likely cuts the cost. I mean I think I'm smart enough to pull a permit, hire an excavator and a concrete guy. The thing that annoys me is that they won't give you the drawings you need to pull the permit until you put a deposit down. To me that just opens the door to my deposit going poof. I may not be the best gauge as I don't trust anybody.

About 20% of the pole building outfits I've been looking at will pull the permit for a fee and others have sent me unstamped drawings during the bid process. They all seem to have established relationships with concrete crews and some will even do the site prep. The extra coin for a nicer building from somebody local and less options for it to go off the rails sounds like a fair trade to me.

One thing I've found with the metal building guys: they rape you on the garage doors. Standard issue doors on metal buildings are u-store-it style roll ups. If you opt for an actual door instead, they charge $5k to install the same doors you can pay home depot $2k to install.