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CloudFlare publishes their pricing. Akamai doesn't. Dealing with salespeople is a massive PITA. They're not going to tell me anything that's not in the docs

CloudFlare publishes their pricing. Akamai doesn't. Dealing with salespeople is a massive PITA. They're not going to tell me anything that's not in the docs or support forums and I don't want to spend a week negotiating. I've seen many others make this point on HN over the years. Maybe Akamai only focuses on large enterprise customers while CloudFlare also goes for the SMB market. IDK. The HN crowd seems to work at SMBs (startups included) or at companies big enough to operate their own CDN.

tbrock 9y ago
Why do startups that sell to other startups hire sales people to do this instead of just having clear pricing? Obviously they must extract some value for the business but the experience of haggling with some sales bro to get a decent price leaves me so annoyed with services that I usually skip signing up when it’s the only option. > Let’s talk about solutions! No thanks. I just want to insert dollars and get the service.
- kbaker 9y ago
  It's because just having a pricing page doesn't give any feedback as to whether the price is correct or not. A salesperson could at least ask 'what is a better price we can shoot for?' or 'what features do you really need?' whereas a visitor to a pricing page just disappears.
  - freehunter 9y ago
    You can A/B test pricing, Amazon does it all the time. You can have a pricing page that says "If this seems off to you, let us know and we'll talk" like Papertrail does. There are plenty of options, but if you're worried about customers walking away, you're losing tons of them by making them call you first.
    - manquer 9y ago
      Pricing is hard. Your platform may have 1000's of features, not all of which all your clients want or can pay for. Packaging into simple groups may not possible until you have the volumes to figure out what works Many clients need specific features that you don't have yet, pricing calculation becomes very complex, and depends on customer to customer as well. We will charge more to some customers simply because we know they need a lot of hand holding and special assistance
  - antpls 9y ago
    I don't run any business so I don't have much info, only questions. Why could you not simply add a "custom solution, contact us here" next to the publicly priced offers? That way everyone is addressed, best of both world.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- koolba 9y ago
  Mainly because it makes boatloads more money than a single cookie cutter option.
  - tbrock 9y ago
    I’d pay more money for an option without the endless phone calls and emails, it’s like advertising that you have to listen to.
  - fludlight 9y ago
    Multiple cookie cutter options + "call us if you want" works pretty well for Salesforce. Pay-for-what-you-use-until-you're-huge is sufficiently profitable for AWS/google cloud/Azure. The frustration expressed here is against the companies that force prospective users to call them, no matter what.
    - koolba 9y ago
      Having tiered pricing + "Call us if ..." works at a large scale. At small scale, particularly smaller startups in the B2B space, extracting value from each deal matters a lot more as you don't have anywhere near the level of deal flow on your inbound funnel. Note that B2C is totally different and unless you're doing some very high priced / bespoke delivery then you have to go cookie cutter.
- qubex 9y ago
  The simple answer to your question of why B2B startups devote resources to salespeople rather than having a clear (published) pricing strategy is that they don’t know how much their prospective good/service is worth and therefore need an interactive ”price discovery” process to occur. Once that process has occurred, however, they’re left with a dilemma: they sold the same thing to one client for $150k, to another one for $300k, and one got it bundled for free. How on earth can they keep a straight face when they go ahead and publish a single price that will at the very least infuriate two out of three of their early adopters? They’ve trapped themselves until they can offer something radically new and therefore decoupled from prior pricing. And by then the salesperson-centric paradigm may be so engrained into the firm’s behaviour that it is no longer possible to change.
LeoPanthera 9y ago
Fuck I hate this. I've avoided buying storage servers from ixsystems, despite the fact their products seem to be exactly what we need, because they won't tell me how much they fucking cost. They want to have a "conversation" about "solutions". Fuck you. Sell me boxes and tell me how much they cost. But they won't.
- freehunter 9y ago
  I work for a vendor and I'm not allowed to tell my clients pricing because I'm not qualified to make deals. We don't even have a list price published internally, it's all at the salesman's discretion. That means some clients pay $150k, some pay $300k, some get it for free bundled with another purchase. Far too often I'm asked "budgetary pricing" but even that is a conversation with a solution architect and a virtual procurement cycle and an NDA and all that nonsense. Just so we can make sure someone is getting overcharged.
  - na85 9y ago
    "Solution Architect" is a nauseating concept.
    - freehunter 9y ago
      To be fair, it does represent a concept where I don't know any other word that can take its place. We sell incredibly complicated systems that necessarily interact with many other complicated systems. We don't work natively with all of them, and sometimes we need to do custom work. Not to mention that we need hardware in many geographical areas, yet still need to work when the virtual space doesn't line up with the physical space. It's not as easy as "am I buying the small, medium, or large solution". Before you invest tens of millions of dollars into this one product, you need someone from the vendor to analyze your infrastructure and tell you if our product will work, and then how many you need to buy and where you need to put them geographically, and then how many hours of custom programming it will take to get everything working with the other systems. That's far outside any definition of "salesman" I've ever heard. These people are project architects and their speciality is solution design. It's not a three-tier SaaS solution.
goatsi 9y ago
Cloudflare only publishes the prices for their lower tiers, for enterprise it's "Contact Us".
tootie 9y ago
Akamai has been around since web 1.0 and reached critical mass before the freemium model was prevalent. At this point, they sell on reputation. They serve such a ludicrous amount of traffic and I can't recall ever seeing a major outage. I've been in and out of a lot of IT departments and every single one has used Akamai for public-facing systems. And I mean, every one.
gfk 9y ago
You can get Akamai CDN through Azure: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-cdn-from-akamai-ga/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-cdn-from-akamai... and they publish their pricing, no minimum purchase: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/cdn/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/cdn/

tbrock 9y ago

Why do startups that sell to other startups hire sales people to do this instead of just having clear pricing? Obviously they must extract some value for the business but the experience of haggling with some sales bro to get a decent price leaves me so annoyed with services that I usually skip signing up when it’s the only option. > Let’s talk about solutions! No thanks. I just want to insert dollars and get the service.

kbaker 9y ago
It's because just having a pricing page doesn't give any feedback as to whether the price is correct or not. A salesperson could at least ask 'what is a better price we can shoot for?' or 'what features do you really need?' whereas a visitor to a pricing page just disappears.
- freehunter 9y ago
  You can A/B test pricing, Amazon does it all the time. You can have a pricing page that says "If this seems off to you, let us know and we'll talk" like Papertrail does. There are plenty of options, but if you're worried about customers walking away, you're losing tons of them by making them call you first.
  - manquer 9y ago
    Pricing is hard. Your platform may have 1000's of features, not all of which all your clients want or can pay for. Packaging into simple groups may not possible until you have the volumes to figure out what works Many clients need specific features that you don't have yet, pricing calculation becomes very complex, and depends on customer to customer as well. We will charge more to some customers simply because we know they need a lot of hand holding and special assistance
- antpls 9y ago
  I don't run any business so I don't have much info, only questions. Why could you not simply add a "custom solution, contact us here" next to the publicly priced offers? That way everyone is addressed, best of both world.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
koolba 9y ago
Mainly because it makes boatloads more money than a single cookie cutter option.
- tbrock 9y ago
  I’d pay more money for an option without the endless phone calls and emails, it’s like advertising that you have to listen to.
- fludlight 9y ago
  Multiple cookie cutter options + "call us if you want" works pretty well for Salesforce. Pay-for-what-you-use-until-you're-huge is sufficiently profitable for AWS/google cloud/Azure. The frustration expressed here is against the companies that force prospective users to call them, no matter what.
  - koolba 9y ago
    Having tiered pricing + "Call us if ..." works at a large scale. At small scale, particularly smaller startups in the B2B space, extracting value from each deal matters a lot more as you don't have anywhere near the level of deal flow on your inbound funnel. Note that B2C is totally different and unless you're doing some very high priced / bespoke delivery then you have to go cookie cutter.
qubex 9y ago
The simple answer to your question of why B2B startups devote resources to salespeople rather than having a clear (published) pricing strategy is that they don’t know how much their prospective good/service is worth and therefore need an interactive ”price discovery” process to occur. Once that process has occurred, however, they’re left with a dilemma: they sold the same thing to one client for $150k, to another one for $300k, and one got it bundled for free. How on earth can they keep a straight face when they go ahead and publish a single price that will at the very least infuriate two out of three of their early adopters? They’ve trapped themselves until they can offer something radically new and therefore decoupled from prior pricing. And by then the salesperson-centric paradigm may be so engrained into the firm’s behaviour that it is no longer possible to change.

LeoPanthera 9y ago

Fuck I hate this. I've avoided buying storage servers from ixsystems, despite the fact their products seem to be exactly what we need, because they won't tell me how much they fucking cost. They want to have a "conversation" about "solutions". Fuck you. Sell me boxes and tell me how much they cost. But they won't.

freehunter 9y ago
I work for a vendor and I'm not allowed to tell my clients pricing because I'm not qualified to make deals. We don't even have a list price published internally, it's all at the salesman's discretion. That means some clients pay $150k, some pay $300k, some get it for free bundled with another purchase. Far too often I'm asked "budgetary pricing" but even that is a conversation with a solution architect and a virtual procurement cycle and an NDA and all that nonsense. Just so we can make sure someone is getting overcharged.
- na85 9y ago
  "Solution Architect" is a nauseating concept.
  - freehunter 9y ago
    To be fair, it does represent a concept where I don't know any other word that can take its place. We sell incredibly complicated systems that necessarily interact with many other complicated systems. We don't work natively with all of them, and sometimes we need to do custom work. Not to mention that we need hardware in many geographical areas, yet still need to work when the virtual space doesn't line up with the physical space. It's not as easy as "am I buying the small, medium, or large solution". Before you invest tens of millions of dollars into this one product, you need someone from the vendor to analyze your infrastructure and tell you if our product will work, and then how many you need to buy and where you need to put them geographically, and then how many hours of custom programming it will take to get everything working with the other systems. That's far outside any definition of "salesman" I've ever heard. These people are project architects and their speciality is solution design. It's not a three-tier SaaS solution.

goatsi 9y ago

Cloudflare only publishes the prices for their lower tiers, for enterprise it's "Contact Us".

tootie 9y ago

Akamai has been around since web 1.0 and reached critical mass before the freemium model was prevalent. At this point, they sell on reputation. They serve such a ludicrous amount of traffic and I can't recall ever seeing a major outage. I've been in and out of a lot of IT departments and every single one has used Akamai for public-facing systems. And I mean, every one.

gfk 9y ago

You can get Akamai CDN through Azure: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-cdn-from-akamai-ga/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-cdn-from-akamai... and they publish their pricing, no minimum purchase: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/cdn/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/cdn/