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Ask HN: Is “contact us for pricing” a dark pattern?
Some companies have simple products with no explicit pricing. When I call them, there is no custom or bespoke aspects of the pricing and they simply quote me a price. Why didn't they just put it on their website?
- willcate 6y agoBothers me too. I think it's a weasel-y move because it forces the customer to start a convo at an information-disadvantage.
- max_ 6y agoIt's to give worse prices to customers that are not good at negotiating.
- morpheos137 6y agoIt is a transparently obnoxious pattern, unless you are buying something expensive and highly customisable.
- detaro 6y agoIf there truly is no meaningful exchange of details before giving a price, pretty much yes. (although tbh even "who is the client" can be relevant - few people are going to put "in our experience companies in industry X are always a pain to work with and cause more support needs, and thus we'll bill higher" on the website, but if you have few high-value contracts that's a relevant concern. Not so much if you sell many small things.)
- VoodooJuJu 6y agoI wouldn't call it a dark pattern. It's more like an archaic sales tactic, but I guess it still works. It's the old "How Much Money Do You Have?" pricing scheme [1]. They're either getting income/revenue information that's connected in some way to the number you called from, or you're providing just enough information to enable them to quote a particular price for you. [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-duckies/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...
- Daho0n 6y agoYou shouldn't call them and find something else. It's a money grab.
- meowster 6y agoYes it is a money grab, but there are industries where every player does this, so you have no choice but to play their game if you want in.
- cloudking 6y agoIt's mostly relevant for enterprise customers, even if you have pricing for them listed they will not just sign up for your service. Enterprise deals involve many steps: demos, negotiations, contracts, trials, security reviews etc. You would want them to contact you to get this process started.
- jimmaswell 6y agoI skip anything that doesn't tell me the pricing terms up front.
- ouid 6y agoAbsolutely. Try to imagine how much different the world would be if, for instance, job listings were required to post their compensation exactly.
- ChrisLomont 6y agoI've gotten multiple jobs in life where I was able to negotiate a much larger salary then they had intended to pay due to being of more worth to them once they interviewed me. So that would be done away with? No thanks. I'm happy that people have varying skillsets and that employers can pay more or less for a posting based on the person they choose.
- ouid 6y agoI think you're guilty of falling prey to the "decoy effect" here. The labor market is a carnival, and they're selling tokens to you. You can buy 25 tokens for 10 dollars or 15 tokens for 5 dollars. The latter strategy is locally optimal, and you are using that as an argument for it's global optimality. That's exactly the point of the con though. Companies DO NOT want to bid on labor, so they'll use whatever trick they can to avoid having to do it.
- HeyLaughingBoy 6y agoNo, he's not. That's what gets lost in the shuffle in discussions like this. He is saying it works for him and like it or not, that's what the vast majority of people care about. What's In It For Me?
- ouid 6y agoNo, that's a mischaracterization of my argument. The decoy here is the lower salary that was the supposedly "market rate" salary for the work he does. That price wasn't advertised publicly in a central market for job listings, so it's an unrelated third option that is dominated by his current strategy that drives him to believe that his current strategy is globally optimal, despite tremendous evidence to the contrary. He would make more money if he could sort job listings by offered salary.
- yoz-y 6y agoI don't remember where, but once I read an article saying something like "If Space-X can have price calculator right on their side, so can your shitty SaaS solution."
- is_true 6y agoThat's really shortsighted. A SaaS company could meet an amount of new requirements that I'm sure SpaceX can't.
- chrismatheson 6y agoSure, but they could also give me some idea of what the core product costs without my specific tweaks
- jldupont 6y agoThis practice is to enable suppliers to perform "value based pricing" i.e. adapt their price according to how much you want / need their offer.
- rotoole 6y agoYes, this means the business model is based on extracting whatever they can get from you.
- codegeek 6y agoCan you clarify a bit more ? Are you saying you call these companies and they just give you a price for Item X without asking you any questions ? Are you saying it is a commodity product/service that has no variation at all depending on your needs ?
- tylerrobinson 6y agoWow! A lot of fast replies here without much substance. "A dark pattern is "a user interface that has been carefully crafted to trick users into doing things, such as buying overpriced insurance with their purchase or signing up for recurring bills"."[0] By this definition, no, it's not a dark pattern. It may be a pricing strategy that you don't like, but not a dark pattern. It's an invitation to start a full discussion with the vendor about what you're trying to achieve. Usually, you'll see "Contact Us" on the pricing page for enterprise services. If you're an enterprise buyer, you usually have lots of people on your team who want different things. You might have special requirements for your industry. You probably need to sign a contract for special provisions or services. Or maybe the vendor is in a new market and they're trying to learn about their customers with an MVP. How many times have you seen the recommendation here on HN to set up a landing page and add a button that says "Email me if you're interested"? Same idea. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pattern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pattern
- flax 6y agoBy that definition it _is_ a dark pattern. The thing people are being tricked into doing is divulging contact info/interest even if they're not going to buy at the eventually revealed price.
- ironmagma 6y agoAlso, the act of filling out a form may cause them to give undue weight to the product since there has been an “investment” made after submitting. So that is another way the pattern tricks you.
- horsawlarway 6y agoI mostly agree with you, but I think there are forms of this that I would definitely consider dark patterns - The one that immediately jumps to mind is "Add this item to your cart to see the price". There's no good intention there, just manipulation. The statistics show a user is more likely to buy an item after adding it to their cart, and this forces them to do that before revealing pertinent information to the user. --- Basically - If it's not a solution that can be customized to the user/customer, I find hiding the price is almost always a dark pattern. If it is a solution that can be customized, it may or may not be a dark pattern, but I still tend to avoid companies that do this - it often means they want additional information from me, or that they're hoping additional sales and marketing information will make me less price sensitive before showing me the final price.
- habitue 6y agoAs others have said, it's an old sales tactic that benefits the seller. You'll see it mostly in places where: 1. There's not much competition for the product, so the seller has no reason to compete on price and make things easy to compare 2. The sales process / cycle for that industry requires so many stakeholders and agreements etc that pre-committing to a price range up front is just an unnecessary handicap. They'll be in negotiations with numerous executives with a prospective buyer potentially for years before getting a signature. In these situations the buyer is not a naive consumer, they're a corporation that can take care of themselves and giving out the price is a free point in that game. 3. They haven't sold anything yet. They are still in the research phase and are feeling out what people might pay.
- qeternity 6y agoI see a lot of answers about how it enables companies to charge more. That’s true, but it also enables companies to charge less. It’s all about price discrimination, and it’s not a bad thing. Without this you either end up with one of two scenarios. Scenario 1: companies price extremely high on paper and then negotiate down afterwards, as happens in the US health insurance markets, and it’s a nightmare. Or scenario 2 the producer ends up pricing for their profit maximizing volume, which at constant price means customers who realize greater utility are subsidized by those who realize the least utility. Consider a very real example: AWS charges outrageous markups on bandwidth. This is because many organizations realize far greater value from the AWS ecosystem and are willing to pay. This prices out people who are more price sensitive, and means they end up using a competitor, even if Amazon would happily sell them bandwidth at a lower price. They simply can’t without canibalizing their fatter customers. I’ve negotiated services for startups at a fraction of the cost of what larger companies are paying (on the order of 90% less) because of this dark pattern.
- is_true 6y agoIt depends, I live in a country with a lot of regulations and inflation. I would've to change prices every week. I do it because I have a platform that allows me to, but not everyone has as much data. On the other hand, we offer a custom plan that has a contact us for pricing button. Because in that plan we are gonna do whatever we can to add as much value as possible for your business. Mostly integrations and updates on legacy systems.
- AtlasBarfed 6y agoNot only are they trying to obscure pricing (the ideal pricing scheme for any good for the seller is to maximize what EACH customer is willing to pay), they are trying to increase your "sunken cost fallacy" switching cost by engaging in a long drawn out sales process.
- fab1an 6y agoNo, in fact you should consider it a relevant signal contributing to the UX of a site: if you're appalled by seeing this on a site, you are vrey very likely not a good fit for them and vice versa.
- DevX101 6y agoRule of thumb: Assume any SAAS company with a "Contact us for pricing" will cost at least $20k per year. If your price point is much less than this you should probably just have users self-service with a credit card.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y agoRight. I treat "contact us for pricing" as the corporate equivalent of "if you have to ask, you can't afford it".
- ambivalents 6y agoWhere did you get that number? I think it really varies. One of the products I manage is a lower price point but the implementation and use cases are complex and different for each customer. It does not make sense to enable self-service implementation for our software.
- llarsson 6y agoEnterprises often want your solution to integrate with so many other pieces of software that you are firmly out of "list prices" territory and very much in "let's design a solution that fits all these unique needs... and also has to run on-prem, because of this or that regulation" one, instead. If your needs are served by the standard packages and you want to hook the thing up to your Slack for notifications, that's super. There is a pricing plan for that. If you need basically a full year's worth of effort to hook this service up to your environment, and you want the experts involved with doing this integration, there's a kind of pricing plan for that, too. The latter just does not look reasonable on a web page, because it starts with "it depends" and scales (non-?)linearly.
- grumple 6y agoI think it's a bad marketing technique. As a developer, I'm asked to evaluate competing technologies all the time and pick one. I can see what your competitors charge. "Contact us for pricing" means you're out of the running. I know, it's a sales technique, but it's one that just cost you business. The business execs that I'd have to involve to contact you for pricing are, firstly - cheap, secondly - are probably going to outnegotiate you, thirdly - introduces a whole level of complexity to the process that I'd rather just pick your competitor and ask for approval.
- motohagiography 6y agoWhen I'm looking for pricing, I'm looking for order of magnitude, and enterprise sales guys want me to invest hours of meetings just to get that because it's an investment/sunk cost to them, but as an architect, it's really just a question of "does this scale in single digit multiples of $10, $100, $1,000 $10,000, or $100,000?" and I don't want to sit through what some of us have come to call their stupid time-share presentation. But the reason they do those dumb meetings is it seems related to their performance measurement, which is ultimately by revenue, but it is a function of deals and their stage through their sales pipeline. How do you measure the quarterly performance of a sales person when the average enterprise sales cycle can be 6-18 months? Number of deals in the pipeline per stage and probability of that revenue landing. By forcing stupid meetings to get the most minor bit of information, they can move my "deal," into a pipeline stage that improves the perception of their performance numbers, independently of whether revenue is ultimately realized. If you are a startup they need those numbers for projections that go into investor and analyst presentations that get you the funding to stay alive, and it's why you don't want engineers to say something or add information that will collapse the superposition of everyone's ability to believe long enough to survive to a more stable state. My experience has been that enterprise sales are bizarre political intrigues that are divorced from features and product qualities, where concreteness itself becomes the enemy. So, tl;dr: "contact us for pricing," isn't so much a dark pattern as it is the outer edge of an infinite existential void. I'm sure there is a more optimistic explanation though.
- asdff 6y agoOh yes it is. In my field, usually that means purchasing requires dealing with some fast speaking salesperson to 'hook you up' with their great deal so they can get a nice commission and you get an inflated price just within the maximum budget you've earmarked. It's straight out of the used car salesman playbook, trying to size up your mark to see how much juice you can squeeze out of them. If pricing was done logically scaled to some size, it would just be listed as such. If I see "call for price" or something like that, I spend earnest effort looking for a competitor that deals with me straight without having my contact info first.
- ryandvm 6y agoI don't know about dark pattern, but I do know that in most cases, I am so averse to negotiating that I'd rather do without the product/service than reach out to ANYONE to talk about pricing.
- the_only_law 6y agoI generally just assume it means “I can’t afford this”.
- dccoolgai 6y agoNo, it is not. Go listen to the Planet Money episode about why old veterans hate the red cross. When you don't have enough information to set price well, you can do a ton of damage to your company by setting it too low. It's not always a "great strategy" but it's not a dark pattern in and of itself.
- soared 6y agoITT: Nobody who has ever been involved in enterprise purchasing and decision making. When my employer (only ~300 people) switched to salesforce it took 3 years from when we started looking at vendors to completing the switch. Buying software at this level is not just adding it to your cart, its creating a project that will take up huge chunks of dev time. Its a discussion between parties, and the price (contract) takes months of work to agree on. We hired a consultant literally just for redlining. https://blog.pandadoc.com/what-is-contract-redlining-and-contract-drafting/ https://blog.pandadoc.com/what-is-contract-redlining-and-con... Just because you can implement easily does not mean 90% of the vendor's customers can.
- Amin3456 6y agoHow to Take Care of Betta Fish https://bit.ly/2Zqahul https://bit.ly/2Zqahul
- xyzzy123 6y agoSometimes there's no good reason, but the common case is: It ensures you are captured as a lead and establishes a human connection. Serious buyers have no problem getting on the phone. The fixed price you were quoted is a starting point for negotiation. It's the "book price", aka the chump price. You're leaving money on the table if you're not haggling with them or finding a way to get a better deal. Enterprise culture is to negotiate price. They have purchasing teams - multiple people whose entire job is to get a better deal than whatever is listed on the website or the first number quoted over the phone. These people are hard nosed and have zero problems calling for a price. A good purchaser on a big enough deal would rather hunt down your sales team on linkedin and start talking than accept a list price on your website. As an aside: How many people would hang a sign around their neck with a fixed price when looking for non-contract employment? How many slap a fixed price on the side of their house during a sale? Fixed prices are in some ways the anomaly; haggling mostly disappears when the cost of negotiation exceeds the benefit of price discrimination and products and customers are fungible. Personally I love fixed prices but most business does not work like that.
- jimmaswell 6y ago> How many slap a fixed price on the side of their house during a sale? Everyone? Every house listing I've seen has a price on it. Negotiating can happen but advertising a price is the norm.
- antonyh 6y agoThere's no trickery, they just want contact details to get you into the sales funnel. It's a strategy, and just because there's no custom/bespoke pricing for you doesn't mean they wouldn't cut a deal for hundreds or thousands of users. That said, I'm shocked they'd do this for a simple product selling a single item. It wouldn't be worth the time spent on the phone.
- kangnkodos 6y agoI once read that you can sell software to companies for under $100 or over $100,000, but not for anything in between. If a salesman is required, perhaps to customize the order, you end up on the expensive side. That side also has "contact us for pricing". The same idea applies when selling other products to companies, with slightly different dollar thresholds.
- dabbledash 6y agoI don’t think it’s a dark pattern, but it makes me much much less likely to buy.
- nyerp 6y agoA startup doesn't necessarily want everyone to know its pricing. They might be happy to let potential customers know, but not competitors, family and friends, customers' clients and suppliers, the press, etc. Making people contact the company lets the startup screen inquiries. And competitors aren't likely to have the gall to ask.
- ksec 6y agoIt Depends. If your target customer are large Business or Enterprise, then it is a great filter.
- amanzi 6y agoI always assume that if I have to ask for pricing then I can't afford it.
- Trias11 6y agoThey try force you to watch/listen/engage into sales dance with their sales people. Typical for overpriced products or middlemen-driven sales pipeline
- paulie_a 6y agoIt's not a dark pattern but Ive already clicked away to research other products. You don't show the price because you want me to talk to a salesperson that has to justify the price. I don't want to talk to a sales person. I want a demo account if it's a service and a number for a technical person to answer questions Save the pitch for someone who gives a damn The sales person is an impediment to the sales process
- sloaken 6y agoFor your situation I agree. And when I run into that, I just pass them by and go on to another vendor. There are only a few reasons where I could see 'contact us for pricing' being appropriate: 1 Volatility caused by unknown market or price war, where competitor keeps causing price stability issues. 2 Complex purchase - too many confusing options - so we have to have a sales person walk you through it. 'So you want a web page and you need a specific person to do it ...' 3 Contractual - in rare instances a vendor can purchase excess product, at a steep discount. But are not allowed to advertise the price. All other options make me think of a used car salesman trying to figure out how much they can do you for.
- ryankrage77 6y agoas a layperson I take it to mean "if you have to ask, you can't afford it".
- jenkstom 6y agoIt's annoying to the person who needs to get details and pricing and who would love to buy the product but right now is just trying to find out if a project is feasible. It's insulting in that they could just give me the information but they won't because they think I am too stupid to understand it "the way they intend it" (i.e., in a way that doesn't solve my problem or does so using mostly marketing buzzwords that cause endless technical implementation issues and waste so very much time). The buzzword I've learned to dislike the most is "RESTful!". It means that your API is written by developers who don't my industry at all. And no, it doesn't matter what industry. RESTful means you've started with a set of premises that don't work in the real work except under very limited circumstances (like distributing media files). It's self-destructive in that any normal people aren't interested in a sales pitch. They just want information. If you aren't going to provide that then you're at the bottom of the list and we're probably going with a competitor of yours unless you somehow find out that I need a similar product and you start calling upper management. That's the worst-case scenario... now we aren't implementing technology that fits into our use case and architecture, we're dealing with a push from senior management to use technology that doesn't work. We know that a sales call means your product sucks. Hard. At face value no, this isn't a dark pattern. But experience tells me otherwise. If your product is "contact us for a quote!" then I already know it won't work and is overpriced because you have to work so very hard to "sell" it. Could I be wrong? Yes. Have I been wrong? No. In 30 years of doing this. Wow... I guess I had a lot to say on this subject. I feel so much better now. ;-)
- XCSme 6y agoI have a "contact us" for the agency plan of userTrack.net as the pricing depends on what do you intend to use the product for and how many clients do you want to offer access to. I do clearly state pricing for the normal plans, otherwise that would just push away most of the customers.
- quickthrower2 6y agoThey don't want you to see it for $10 then later see it for $40 and feel ripped off
- openlowcode 6y agoI have no problem with the 'contact us for pricing', but I am astonished at the number of dark patterns that some big Internet e-commerce sites use. Maybe time for some regulations or monopoly-breaking?