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Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

195 points by mrtomservo 4y ago

Hi everyone, I've been tasked with finding ballpark pricing for a dozen-item list of enterprise SaaS software. The websites for most of these packages list the price as "Contact Us," and I'd like to avoid spending the next month in sales calls. Is there a website or service that lists cost ranges for enterprise SaaS products? Thanks in advance for your help!

evanwolf 4y ago
i liked the differentiation where Enterprise customers paid for full seats + things only a large company would want + fudge factor for slow to pay and higher cost of sales. the hardest part is if their software required extensive integration and customization; that help would cost extra and the project would be largely it depends.
deepsun 4y ago
Joel wrote about it in 2004: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-duckies/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...
polishdude20 4y ago
Check out Vendr! https://www.vendr.com/ https://www.vendr.com/
giantg2 4y ago
I'd imagine surveys here could be useful (to you and to other searchers). But I'm not sure how accurate they'd be. If they list the price that way, it's likely to be highly variable for each client, possibly even with different contract/support terms by client. But I feel your pain. Trying to compare preschool tuitions is a nightmare because they only want to tell you if you go for a visit.
- lazide 4y ago
  It’s also because they are trying to compete on experience, which you have to be there to see, and not just raw $$ price. If they have out the price for free, it would be even more of a race to the bottom.
AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
Unlikely you'll find any good source. "contact us" pricing revolves around understanding the customer's use case deeply enough so that you can demonstrate maximum product value to them and then extract the most possible money. I despise it.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  I'd love to have a way to scare salespeople straight by showing them how many sales they are losing because of this bad practice.
  - lazide 4y ago
    For the sales people, it rarely results in missed sales they care about. The ones who are super into this are almost always commission. If the company does less overall revenue (due to fewer overall sales), that is not a problem as long as they get more overall revenue (commission) due to the sales they land being ‘richer’. It’s a pretty classic owner/agent issue. The company should care, probably, but there are also reasons for some companies to prefer high touch interactions - it gives huge insight from a product perspective, and can provide insights to tackle other verticals they might otherwise struggle to even know existed. Going in volume does make good numbers though, if you’re setup in a way that you can keep it going. Toyota, Honda, etc. have very solid fleet and ‘pay the flat rate and go’ markets they serve.
    - Jayab 4y ago
      Again I can vouche for seeing this in the physical industrial world. Sales only care about landing big deals with big margins, couldn't care less about many, many small fish. They wine and dine big clients and then build summer homes in the local hot spots off those projects commissions.
- xmonkee 4y ago
  I'll defend it because I'm doing it: We have a very very young company, and we are building our product with our customers. We are in fact charging very little right now with the understanding that our product is immature, and later we plan to increase pricing to get to a profitable level. There is absolutely no way to come up with any sort of standard pricing for us, since each customer means a lot of feature and customer support.
legitster 4y ago
Some sites like Capterra or TrustRadius will occasionally have pricing data about various products. If you go through a third party vendor or MSP, they may also be able to give you more realistic pricing data based on existing customers. But honestly, picking up a phone and calling is good practice anyway. If you can't get an honest ballpark estimate within 5 minutes that's not a company you want to work with anyway.
Multicomp 4y ago
Don't B2B companies do something like RFPs where they do a request for pricing and give a boilerplate / generic usecase of number of users, number of requests etc and expect the companies to bid back on results? Maybe something like that could help you / maybe there is a business opportunity there to do aggregated sales calls so these companies can be compared side-by-side (though they probably would give inflated rates like hospitals do because they know insurance will knock the prices down).
scrapcode 4y ago
This will normally depend on many factors. This is usually going to be the quantity of units and the level and availability of support, but could include other factors depending on the domain. Your initial "subscription" is generally going to be more than your renewal, sometimes way more. If it is a COTS offering that is likely to be used in the US Govt, I recommend trying to find your product on GSA Advantage [0], but it is helpful to have the manufacturer's part number handy, which often takes a consultation with a sales entity. Good luck! [0] https://www.gsaadvantage.gov/ https://www.gsaadvantage.gov/
chrisdbanks 4y ago
Some companies make you sign an NDA before they tell you their prices.
gunapologist99 4y ago
As you already know, this is typical for "enterprise" software due to the idea that potential customers will immediately click away if the price seems too high, so you need to let your customer know what value is in your software before they immediately walk away. One take-away from this is the old "if you have to ask, you can't afford it", and another is that they're automatically filtering out lower-value or price-sensitive customers. However, an obvious counterpoint is that Atlassian built a multi-billion-dollar business around up-front pricing, and even seem to still offer that up-front pricing today. As a general rule, any software which requires "contact us" is going to be somewhere between $50k and $750k, generally annually, (usually for a fully-loaded site license on the high end), but there are definitely exceptions above and below. Certainly there are companies in some industries (WorkDay, Oracle, SalesForce, etc) that are known for being extremely expensive, and there are certainly many companies that would like to get into an upper tier but just aren't quite there yet, and smaller startups (esp non-VC funded) are often on the low end.
- wwkeyboard 4y ago
  That's a much more generous take than I had. I always assumed "contact us" pricing meant "tell us who you work for so we can google their funding level before suggesting a price to you".
  - Bilal_io 4y ago
    I am sure that's the correct assumption for some companies. I don't think it's right regardless how big the customer. But there are always exceptions, the size of your customer's business may affect your effort for onboarding and continues support, and therefore you may charge them different.
  - jabroni_salad 4y ago
    That's definitely true... I mainly service financial institutions and their asset size is part of the calculation.
  - cj 4y ago
    Whether or not your company has a procurement department should always be part of the equation when pricing enterprise deals. (Funding is an indicator of whether your company has one) Smaller companies without procurement departments are quicker and faster to contract with and they pay on time. Bigger companies with procurement departments request last minute contract redlines and never pay on time (always at least 2 weeks late, as a rule of thumb). “Contact us” pricing might benefit you if you are smaller. If you’re at a bigger company, the headache of dealing with your procurement department will inevitably (and justifiably) drive up the price - it’s the bureaucracy tax.
vasco 4y ago
Most of the times you can get rough pricing from them before taking a call if you describe your needs / number of seats, or at most a 20min call. Just make it clear you have many vendors to assess in a first pass and the more calls the less likely you are to subscribe in your opening contact. I'd also recommend only engaging with the top 3 better products before you go through such a big list.
- awb 4y ago
  From someone who’s done a lot of sales, I agree with this. If they dodge the question, asking something direct like: “how many figures are we talking about, 5, 6, 7?” can help. Most of the time sales folks don’t want to quote you a ballpark right off the bat because they know that you’ll be expecting something like that number on the final proposal. If they dodge giving you a price range then try approaching from a different angle, asking what’s the smallest implementation they’ve done (tell them it’s to make sure you’re not too small a project for them). Then ask them about their biggest client (they might start chatting your ear off so be ready to cut them off). Then ask them directly what they would charge for those exact same implementations. You’ll end up with a huge 10k foot view, but you might be able to get that in a few days, then you can drill down into a few of the more suitable vendors.
skmurphy 4y ago
The premise of your assignment is that the specifics of a customer situation don't affect price. For enterprise SaaS this is not the case. There is no "price list" there is structured negotiation that has many parameters, including: Total likely value of the business relationship if solution widely adopted inside prospect What options does winning this deal create? In particular what will the vendor learn and will this relationship open the door to new niches, segments, markets? What is the value of a reference / testimonial from this particular prospect? Two related blog posts for startups who need to manage an enterprise sales process: https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2008/11/12/negotiate-the-level-of-reference-in-parallel-with-price-and-others-terms-and-conditions/ https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2008/11/12/negotiate-the-level... https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2013/02/16/price-based-on-your-value-to-the-customers-situation/ https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2013/02/16/price-based-on-your...
johngalt 4y ago
There isn't a hidden price that is only shown in the sales funnel. But rather the price changes depending on the customer. 'Contact us' = 'give us enough information to accurately price the product for you.' Best way to shortcut the process would be to work with a channel/var that has a majority of the items in their portfolio.
- chosen1x 4y ago
  This is the answer that should top the list. Instead of talking to the individual companies doing this practice directly engage a Value Added Reseller (VAR) large enough to work with most of the people on your list. Their (VAR) scale will let you get list price or typically some degree better and they can assist with the comparisons to pick the product and partner that fits your company needs. Keep in mind that there is essentially zero chance that you are the first person to ask many of the questions that you want answers to and a VAR is in a position to service you no matter which product you choose. All of this should help align you to the right fit. Best of luck.
syvolt 4y ago
I tried looking for something like this but ended up doing over a month of sales calls and meetings. One problem is probably that a lot of companies pull enterprise pricing out of their ass (or there's too many confounding factors that make it look like that), and the other big problem was already mentioned, they're trying to maximize your spending.
brk 4y ago
It really depends heavily on the products and industries or verticals they serve. Also, it may depend on their exact GTM strategy, companies that sell primarily through a VAR type of channel are usually more hesitant to disclose pricing, as some of their partners may wrap other services or functions around the offering. Pricing can also vary based on how turn-key the product it. An enterprise CRM, for example, can be really hard to get pricing for as you are likely going to spend more on the implementation at first than on the actual licenses. In those cases the solution is also somewhat like buying insurance, where the expectation is that you have some customized add-ons and things that are specific to your environment.
sokoloff 4y ago
I should make a bookmarklet that changes "call for pricing" to something like: window.location="https://www.google.com/search?q=" + window.location.host.split(".").slice(-2,-1) + "+vs";
comboy 4y ago
Details like what you actually need are less important, but you would definitely need to enter how much your company is worth as an input, if such website existed. If you have enough options though, you can be upfront about it - hey I have a number of services to check, either you give me ballpark given this copypasta or I'm checking the other ones.
1123581321 4y ago
It’ll be good for you to practice cutting these calls short so you can get your quote.
bombcar 4y ago
If they have a "personal/business" tier that has a price, just use that multiplied by the number of seats/licenses. It's ballpark close enough usually.
- zainhoda 4y ago
  That’s what I would have ordinarily thought but I had a vendor who charged $10/user/mo per user for their “Team” tier but $180,000/year for their “Enterprise” tier with up to 150 users. Made no sense at all.
evilotto 4y ago
To be fair to the annoying "call us" pricing practice, on your end you need to have a ballpark idea of what you want, whether its number of seats, data size, or whatever the product is sized in. Having that makes the calls go faster and can help you and the salesguy save time if there isn't even a chance of a match.
Test0129 4y ago
You likely won't get pricing information out of a company like this. It's safe to assume "Contact Us" is being used as shorthand for a price between expensive and absurdly expensive. Usually companies that do this offer some sort per-company rate based on what you need along with a bunch of additional services. Hate to say it but you're basically only going to find out by going through the sales funnel. Some of them may even turn you down for simply saying "we're evaluating X and would like to know the price".
vehemenz 4y ago
I've had success asking other clients what they pay, assuming they're not a direct competitor of yours. This is easiest at conferences and professional events.
philip1209 4y ago
There's some interesting data in the debt proceedings for the event startup Pollen: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/the-scoop-pollen/ https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/the-scoop-pollen/ Some snippets on their debts, which you cold normalize for their ~150 employees: - Monday.com: ￡515k - AWS: ￡105k - Airtable: ￡7k
- celestialcheese 4y ago
  Very interesting - although probably difficult to glean any kind of generalizable pricing data because some of those vendors could have let unpaid bills slide longer than others. Also, how is Monday.com owed ￡515k on a company of 315 employees? That's 1.5k/employee, so if it's an annual contract they didn't pay, that's $150/user/month? Seems _wild_ expensive. If that's accurate, no wonder Monday.com is able to spend so much on paid ads.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - matesz 4y ago
    > For those asking "how can a 500-person company generate a ~$500K+, unpaid bill on Monday .com when most of the eng team uses JIRA (it would imply $1,000/person for Monday, which seems high, even for a year): I'm wondering the same. > Asked the company: they've not responded yet. https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1583401575715741696?s=20&t=J2CEsNpLV5o9ycqkXrbrUQ https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1583401575715741696?...
barbariangrunge 4y ago
I use the "if you have to ask the price in order to check whether you can afford it or not, you can't afford it, so don't ask" strategy. The price-hiding tactic is a little rude: jewlery stores helped pioneer it, the idea being to get the customer hooked on the item before they think about price, and to imagine the largest number they might be okay with paying ahead of time, while simultaneously making them unsure whether it's too low or not. I don't like dealing with companies who do that sort of thing and I worry what other curve balls they have in store later on. So I opt out. The reason that you can use this on enterprise sales is that you are theoretically offering something that the enterprise needs, no matter how painful the process is -- and there are typically few competitors for them to turn to. Many of the competitors use the same tactic. Hence, we see it all over in that world.
codegeek 4y ago
Best option is to have both. Some fixed starting prices and then Custom/Enterprise/Contact us. That's what we do for my SAAS where we start at $599/Month (B2B) but our custom/contact us prices can go $50k/Year or even more. Some reasons are custom user count, custom features/integrations, tighter SLAs with dedicated Customer Success Manager (CSM) etc. Gotta charge for all those conveniences.
grantsch 4y ago
Companies do this so they can price discriminate for high margin goods and services
JangoSteve 4y ago
A lot of good feedback here. One additional thought I'd provide is that I wouldn't rule someone out based on a "Contact us for price" button. I'd click the button, let them know what you need, and then let them rule themselves out based on their responses. Sometimes they may give you a price directly in their response (or at least a ballpark), sometimes they may insist on a call. Take the call, but draw the line where you're comfortable (e.g. give me a ballpark after 30 minutes or I'm out - you can be more tactful in your wording). Think about it from the company's perspective. Let's imagine as a company, you do an experiment where you have one landing page that shows the pricing, and another landing page that says "contact us". Let's also imagine that your product is enough of an enterprise solution that no one ever buys it without talking to someone at some point during the evaluation process (even if the pricing is up front, it requires enough of an investment that the customer wants to be absolutely certain it will satisfy their needs both now and as they grow). Finally, let's imagine that you have 3 full-time sales people to handle the incoming communications at whatever step of the evaluation process. Now, if the outcome of this experiment is that the "contact us for pricing" results in 1/5th the incoming contacts, but those then convert twice the rate, you might choose the up-front pricing (2x conversion rate but on 20% of the leads means only 40% the sales compared to up-front pricing). However, what if the 5x incoming contacts is too many for your sales team of 3 to respond, causing the up-front pricing to result in fewer sales with more work? Then you might choose the "contact us for pricing". But what if it's so many more incoming contacts at a consistent enough conversion rate that you can justify adding a 4th and 5th sales person to realize those sales? Then you might choose the up-front pricing. But what if the up-front pricing pigeon-holes you into your beachhead market and makes it more difficult to expand vertically or horizontally, which could lead to a trail-off in the incoming contacts and sales? Then you might choose the "contact us for pricing". The point is, the one that makes the most sense for a company depends on a lot of variables, most of which would be opaque to an outside observer. Being able to tell the difference between a company that has "contact us for pricing" because it made sense for them, compared to one trying to exploit price discrimination (as described by some of the more cynical takes) is next to impossible without talking with them. Even in that scenario though, if they end up giving you a better product for a better price, then being willing to reach out to them could end up being a competitive advantage for your company over another which disqualified them on that basis.
datalopers 4y ago
> I'd like to avoid spending the next month in sales calls. Just exclude them from your search. They're garbage software anyway.
throwayyy479087 4y ago
This isn't for B2B - I've seen this a lot in daycares and high-end cars. Generally, it's a way to signal "if you have to ask, you can't afford it"
smithcoin 4y ago
Seems like a good side project. A database where people could submit their SAAS pricing in a Glassdoor like fashion.
- gorkish 4y ago
  I find incredible irony in that the companies like Gartner that perform this exact service are all basically "call for bespoke/maximal pricing" as well.
imagine99 4y ago
"Professional" subreddits, such as /r/MSP, as well as the Spiceworks community will have answers for some of those, depending on what kind of SaaS it is exactly. Ask, oftentimes (former) vendor reps or happy/unhappy customers lurk there and are happy to help you out, although their info might be outdated - but it may help for a first orientation. (I, too, consider price-hiding the bane of my existence and wish I could get those days and months of lifetime back that I spend going through useless "demos" and "quick calls with an evangelist/key account manager/person who nopes out at the first technical question".) Another strategy is that you prepare a long-ish text that you email to a - perferrably senior - sales contact at each company, ideally one that has been referred to you (again, the above-mentioned sources may help). Just change the name and first line mentioning their product and outline that "due to internal restructuring" your company will decide yea or nay "on doing a PoC within the next three working days" (i.e. you don't have time to waste on demos), that you are already very familiar with their product in all details from an earlier job, in fact, you want to recommend to your CTO to buy it, and that you wish to receive nothing more than their current pricing for $detailedreqs asap. Be overspecific as to your reqs and specs, so they can't weasel out with "it depends". You might need to go one or two rounds where they try and talk you into doing calls/demos regardless but they will often CC more senior or local reps whose contacts are not public and if you push back repeating what you said in your first email but shorter, they will usually relent, especially if there are competitors in the field and they're getting afraid that the lead may go cold. This strategy works maybe about 78.3% of the time but will likely fail if the SaaS offering does require extensive and bespoke customisation for your organisation. Good luck, I really don't envy you having to go through this, to me it used to be like running the gauntlet.
startupsales 4y ago
I have pricing on my site revpilots.com for various enterprise software that is normally not listed publicly. We'll even get on calls for you to get pricing.
deleted 4y ago
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jefc1111 4y ago
I normally find discussions on Reddit for these kinds of things. Recently have had to research Acunetix, Snowflake and some others and have found interesting (if anecdotal) info on Reddit.
pclmulqdq 4y ago
My SaaS has only "Contact Sales" pricing right now because I currently don't have the infrastructure set up to sell to you in any other way. If the SaaS companies are young, they may be in the same situation. You could get a good deal by clicking the button. Generally, the less you charge, the more infrastructure is involved in collecting payment - metered SaaS companies can charge you in increments of a few dollars but are backed by complex billing software, while enterprise sales is an invoice from quickbooks (I'm exaggerating a little bit about the level of automation here, but it's close to this). Personally, the price for my "contact sales" product is a lot less than a typical "enterprise sales" product, with the price range being $10-50k. Some other young SaaS companies I have heard of are lower than that. Conversely, established companies with a "contact sales" button tend to start at $50k/year and go up from there to millions. If you take control of the process during the call, and tell them "no" if they give you BS, you can probably get a price.
paxys 4y ago
I'd say if you don't want to spend a month in sales calls then don't work in procurement. There isn't really a short cut, that's what the job is.
AtNightWeCode 4y ago
No, the only comfort I can give you is that you also have to make deals with companies with list prices. Otherwise you end up paying too much.
0xbadcafebee 4y ago
I tried to get SuSE to tell me how much Rancher was so I could just buy it. I was completely ready to just lay down my credit card. They refused without a sales call. And in fact, it was impossible for me to even schedule a sales call without joining their Slack channel to tell them their website's Contact Us form was broken. The call got bumped like 3 times over 2 months, they didn't schedule a new one. Now I've found out that Rancher's support sucks and SuSE is botching their communication, so I'm going with a competitor. SaaS people: Don't make it hard for me to give you money. At the very least, give me a 30 day trial (of Enterprise features) while we go through your stupid sales dance.
TheTaytay 4y ago
TL;DR: use a SaaS procurement vendor like TropicApp.io or Vendr. Long version: First, my heart goes out to you. I was in charge of a lot of SaaS procurement for a number of years, and even as our company grew and our ability to pay went up, the lack of pricing transparency only became more frustrating to me! It used to be: “if we have to ask, we can’t afford it,” but then it became, “we can likely afford it, but it would be nice to make sure we should even talk to this vendor or industry before sitting through long eye-rolling sales calls.” (Or even worse, the 15 minute sales call with an intern to get you as a lead before you can talk to someone who knows anything.) but my blood pressure is rising, and I digress… To level the playing field, we recently signed up with one of the “SaaS procurement” companies that has made this MUCH more tolerable. We use TropicApp.io, and have been happy with them and how they do business. They help us find and negotiate purchases. Even before we buy something, we can ask them stuff like, “we need a tool to do X. What are people using these days, and what is ballpark pricing and pricing model for a tool like that?” They (and their competitors) charge a percentage of the money they save you. They can’t help with smaller stuff (less than 5k per year), but are helpful with the rest. (Not affiliated with them or any competitors like Vendr.com - just happy that these companies exist now, and wish we’d found them sooner.)
ww520 4y ago
"Contact Us" is called value pricing in enterprise lingo. It means the price will reflect how much "value" the product will provide to your organization. If the product can provide $100M "value" for your company, they will be happy to charge you $10M for the product. That's why they need to talk to you, to find out how much "value" they can provide for you.
SavageBeast 4y ago
“Contact Us” Pricing == Highly Variable Pricing. I personally see it as them inviting me to hear them out then waste some of their time before making a deal more along the lines of my price guidelines. Im about 50% success rate id say. End of month reports are always a good time, End of quarter even better, Triple witching week is the best. Sometimes you get lucky and some middle-manager-muckity-muck is only $X thousands from the bonus target... and thats when you find your deals. Start early and be prepared to wait.
- bunabhucan 4y ago
  I know an electric utility that had senior folks work on the last day of the financial year to extract these bargains from desperate licensing vendors.
fapi1974 4y ago
G2.com has a lot of pricing for comparison. Not sure if it necessarily shares information not available on the vendor sites, though.
indymike 4y ago
Contact Us Pricing has different meanings based on company size: Newish Companies: they haven't been able to figure out how to price their product yet. Growth Companies: We're revenue optimizing every deal. "Sales Driven" (as opposed to "product driven): We have to justify the existence of our sales team. Hyper competitive companies: I'm not publishing a price because someone will scrape it and beat us by $1. Large Companies: Our pricing is a four-dimensional matrix with multiple elevators, and we need a team of people to figure out which spreadsheet and which tab to look up x and y to price your deal.
- rchowe 4y ago
  Don't underestimate the ability of small companies to have 4D matrix pricing that nobody can comprehend! It's pretty common in custom manufacturing (which makes sense) but also companies that purchase product/services from others and re-sell them as part of a larger whole. Some folks also don't understand that pricing doesn't have to exactly match your product. I think there is also value for certain lines of business for having a customer meet the sales team and possibly an account manager before using the product, usually if the product has some kind of learning curve or domain specific knowledge where insiders can unlock value.
timhigins 4y ago
capiche.com has some good pricing data and reviews from knowledgeable users.
anonymuscoward 4y ago
If your company is serious about buying that much software your best bet is something like vendr. It'll cost you, but you'll get answers to your pricing questions, and if you're buying, they'll negotiate discounts for you. no need to 'talk to sales'
tenarchits 4y ago
I have found https://sso.tax/ https://sso.tax/ to be helpful.
PaulWaldman 4y ago
There are only three reasons: 1. To allow you to charge customers differently for the same product. 2. If you are offering a highly customized product. 3. To establish value for your product prior to providing pricing. In my experience, #1 is by far the most common for a SaaS. The rationale of "if you have to ask" falls apart because you could just put a high price on your site to filter out the cheapskates. I also find that when evaluating a new product, my first click on their site is the pricing page. It is a semi-standardized way to quickly see the significant features offered without all the verbose prose that you'll find on the product pages.
focusedone 4y ago
Contact us == Prepare for daily emails until you block our domain
blaser-waffle 4y ago
> Is there a website or service that lists cost ranges for enterprise SaaS products? Probably not. Have had good success in the past posting random stuff on reddit, like "I'm paying 12000 / core for Oracle, am I high? Is this common?" in r/sysadmin, and then having people correct me. But for the most part SaaS ain't offer those prices online. Contact someone, set up time for a call, and get prices. This is why vendor managers, sales engineers, solution architects, etc. are a thing.
benrapscallion 4y ago
Capiche.com
tptacek 4y ago
One trick, just to ballpark this --- it probably worked better 10 years ago than today, but I checked a couple vendors and got results --- is to Google the vendor and "GSA price list" (for their FedGov pricing).
fxtentacle 4y ago
Just email them :) Its easy to tell them in the email to not call you back. Plus you can instruct them to include a specific word in their reply subject line so that you can quickly filter to see who read your instructions and who didn't. It's a bit like that concert M&M check.
- sdfhbdf 4y ago
  > concert M&M check For anyone that does not immediately recognize it refers to a popular trope that Van Halen contractually required venues to always sort M&Ms to not have brown ones. It is said this was their canary (in the coal mine) that was supposed to indicate if the venue took obligations seriously and hence will the concert be safe and up to standards. This has a mixed review on snopes.com so take it with a grain of salt but it's a nice idea: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brown-out/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brown-out/
kazinator 4y ago
"Camels and Rubber Duckies", Joel on Software
more_corn 4y ago
Don’t ever use a service that only offers “contact us” pricing. Done.
Spooky23 4y ago
Find a government contract for the services. Many things are on GSA or state contracts.
NibLer 4y ago
I think that they hide prices so that they can charge you the most that they find suitable for your use case. If you are an enterprise user off-the-shelf product is probably not what you need.
dusted 4y ago
I avoid companies that won't publish their prices because it signals two things: 1. If you're not going to spend time jumping OUR hoopes to talk with us, you're not that important, we don't care about you, little fish. 2. We won't quote our price because we want human-human time with you to maximize our quote based on how dumb you are. (how hard can we scam you out of money). There might be a place in the world for a site where existing customers can anonymously report how much they've been quoted for named services at named companies. It'd be very convenient.
eb0la 4y ago
I bought several "contact us" style software. Usually their licensing is hard to calculate and you will need to buy more licenses upfront from what you think you need just in case. Worst experience was a reporting tool for telecoms that was licensed by port. Devices used to have 4-8 ports but the year before suddenly it was feasible to ship 32-port devices to customers. This made the tool prohibitive. My best experience was when a sales rep just called and told me the pricing range for their product: 5x our budget, without counting cost of migration. It was the most productive sales call I ever had.
effnorwood 4y ago
saasbuyer 4y ago
I'm Ryan -- CEO and co-founder of Vendr.com (YCS19). Since YC, we've become one of the largest software buyers in the world ($2B+ spend processed; 15k+ transactions). But, here's what I don't understand -- why does a company like Vendr even need to exist? Companies flock to us to buy software because they are fed up with "Contact Sales", opaque pricing, expiring discounts, and the games associated with sales. Buyers of software are rapidly opting out of sellers' sales processes, coming to Vendr, and asking us to do it for them. Sales is broken. Today, sellers focus on creating sales processes that maximize the leverage and outcomes for the sellers. This creates friction resulting in avg 90 days sales cycles and 20-25% close rates for sellers. Not good. No wonder sales and marketing expense equals ~50% of revenue. When Vendr's successful, we'll have fixed sales. No more games. Fair pricing, correct and fast buying decisions -- powered by data. This results in a win for the seller (lower cost acquisition; shorter sales cycles) and a win for the buyer (best products win; fair pricing). LMK if you need help with any of the "contact us" pricing -- we can easily answer this for you. ryan@vendr.com

195 points by mrtomservo 4y ago

evanwolf 4y ago

i liked the differentiation where Enterprise customers paid for full seats + things only a large company would want + fudge factor for slow to pay and higher cost of sales. the hardest part is if their software required extensive integration and customization; that help would cost extra and the project would be largely it depends.

deepsun 4y ago

Joel wrote about it in 2004: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-duckies/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...

polishdude20 4y ago

Check out Vendr! https://www.vendr.com/ https://www.vendr.com/

giantg2 4y ago

I'd imagine surveys here could be useful (to you and to other searchers). But I'm not sure how accurate they'd be. If they list the price that way, it's likely to be highly variable for each client, possibly even with different contract/support terms by client. But I feel your pain. Trying to compare preschool tuitions is a nightmare because they only want to tell you if you go for a visit.

lazide 4y ago
It’s also because they are trying to compete on experience, which you have to be there to see, and not just raw $$ price. If they have out the price for free, it would be even more of a race to the bottom.

AdamJacobMuller 4y ago

Unlikely you'll find any good source. "contact us" pricing revolves around understanding the customer's use case deeply enough so that you can demonstrate maximum product value to them and then extract the most possible money. I despise it.

PaulHoule 4y ago
I'd love to have a way to scare salespeople straight by showing them how many sales they are losing because of this bad practice.
- lazide 4y ago
  For the sales people, it rarely results in missed sales they care about. The ones who are super into this are almost always commission. If the company does less overall revenue (due to fewer overall sales), that is not a problem as long as they get more overall revenue (commission) due to the sales they land being ‘richer’. It’s a pretty classic owner/agent issue. The company should care, probably, but there are also reasons for some companies to prefer high touch interactions - it gives huge insight from a product perspective, and can provide insights to tackle other verticals they might otherwise struggle to even know existed. Going in volume does make good numbers though, if you’re setup in a way that you can keep it going. Toyota, Honda, etc. have very solid fleet and ‘pay the flat rate and go’ markets they serve.
  - Jayab 4y ago
    Again I can vouche for seeing this in the physical industrial world. Sales only care about landing big deals with big margins, couldn't care less about many, many small fish. They wine and dine big clients and then build summer homes in the local hot spots off those projects commissions.
xmonkee 4y ago
I'll defend it because I'm doing it: We have a very very young company, and we are building our product with our customers. We are in fact charging very little right now with the understanding that our product is immature, and later we plan to increase pricing to get to a profitable level. There is absolutely no way to come up with any sort of standard pricing for us, since each customer means a lot of feature and customer support.

legitster 4y ago

Some sites like Capterra or TrustRadius will occasionally have pricing data about various products. If you go through a third party vendor or MSP, they may also be able to give you more realistic pricing data based on existing customers. But honestly, picking up a phone and calling is good practice anyway. If you can't get an honest ballpark estimate within 5 minutes that's not a company you want to work with anyway.

Multicomp 4y ago

Don't B2B companies do something like RFPs where they do a request for pricing and give a boilerplate / generic usecase of number of users, number of requests etc and expect the companies to bid back on results? Maybe something like that could help you / maybe there is a business opportunity there to do aggregated sales calls so these companies can be compared side-by-side (though they probably would give inflated rates like hospitals do because they know insurance will knock the prices down).

scrapcode 4y ago

This will normally depend on many factors. This is usually going to be the quantity of units and the level and availability of support, but could include other factors depending on the domain. Your initial "subscription" is generally going to be more than your renewal, sometimes way more. If it is a COTS offering that is likely to be used in the US Govt, I recommend trying to find your product on GSA Advantage [0], but it is helpful to have the manufacturer's part number handy, which often takes a consultation with a sales entity. Good luck! [0] https://www.gsaadvantage.gov/ https://www.gsaadvantage.gov/

chrisdbanks 4y ago

Some companies make you sign an NDA before they tell you their prices.

gunapologist99 4y ago

As you already know, this is typical for "enterprise" software due to the idea that potential customers will immediately click away if the price seems too high, so you need to let your customer know what value is in your software before they immediately walk away. One take-away from this is the old "if you have to ask, you can't afford it", and another is that they're automatically filtering out lower-value or price-sensitive customers. However, an obvious counterpoint is that Atlassian built a multi-billion-dollar business around up-front pricing, and even seem to still offer that up-front pricing today. As a general rule, any software which requires "contact us" is going to be somewhere between $50k and $750k, generally annually, (usually for a fully-loaded site license on the high end), but there are definitely exceptions above and below. Certainly there are companies in some industries (WorkDay, Oracle, SalesForce, etc) that are known for being extremely expensive, and there are certainly many companies that would like to get into an upper tier but just aren't quite there yet, and smaller startups (esp non-VC funded) are often on the low end.

wwkeyboard 4y ago
That's a much more generous take than I had. I always assumed "contact us" pricing meant "tell us who you work for so we can google their funding level before suggesting a price to you".
- Bilal_io 4y ago
  I am sure that's the correct assumption for some companies. I don't think it's right regardless how big the customer. But there are always exceptions, the size of your customer's business may affect your effort for onboarding and continues support, and therefore you may charge them different.
- jabroni_salad 4y ago
  That's definitely true... I mainly service financial institutions and their asset size is part of the calculation.
- cj 4y ago
  Whether or not your company has a procurement department should always be part of the equation when pricing enterprise deals. (Funding is an indicator of whether your company has one) Smaller companies without procurement departments are quicker and faster to contract with and they pay on time. Bigger companies with procurement departments request last minute contract redlines and never pay on time (always at least 2 weeks late, as a rule of thumb). “Contact us” pricing might benefit you if you are smaller. If you’re at a bigger company, the headache of dealing with your procurement department will inevitably (and justifiably) drive up the price - it’s the bureaucracy tax.

vasco 4y ago

Most of the times you can get rough pricing from them before taking a call if you describe your needs / number of seats, or at most a 20min call. Just make it clear you have many vendors to assess in a first pass and the more calls the less likely you are to subscribe in your opening contact. I'd also recommend only engaging with the top 3 better products before you go through such a big list.

awb 4y ago
From someone who’s done a lot of sales, I agree with this. If they dodge the question, asking something direct like: “how many figures are we talking about, 5, 6, 7?” can help. Most of the time sales folks don’t want to quote you a ballpark right off the bat because they know that you’ll be expecting something like that number on the final proposal. If they dodge giving you a price range then try approaching from a different angle, asking what’s the smallest implementation they’ve done (tell them it’s to make sure you’re not too small a project for them). Then ask them about their biggest client (they might start chatting your ear off so be ready to cut them off). Then ask them directly what they would charge for those exact same implementations. You’ll end up with a huge 10k foot view, but you might be able to get that in a few days, then you can drill down into a few of the more suitable vendors.

skmurphy 4y ago

The premise of your assignment is that the specifics of a customer situation don't affect price. For enterprise SaaS this is not the case. There is no "price list" there is structured negotiation that has many parameters, including: Total likely value of the business relationship if solution widely adopted inside prospect What options does winning this deal create? In particular what will the vendor learn and will this relationship open the door to new niches, segments, markets? What is the value of a reference / testimonial from this particular prospect? Two related blog posts for startups who need to manage an enterprise sales process: https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2008/11/12/negotiate-the-level-of-reference-in-parallel-with-price-and-others-terms-and-conditions/ https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2008/11/12/negotiate-the-level... https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2013/02/16/price-based-on-your-value-to-the-customers-situation/ https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2013/02/16/price-based-on-your...

johngalt 4y ago

There isn't a hidden price that is only shown in the sales funnel. But rather the price changes depending on the customer. 'Contact us' = 'give us enough information to accurately price the product for you.' Best way to shortcut the process would be to work with a channel/var that has a majority of the items in their portfolio.

chosen1x 4y ago
This is the answer that should top the list. Instead of talking to the individual companies doing this practice directly engage a Value Added Reseller (VAR) large enough to work with most of the people on your list. Their (VAR) scale will let you get list price or typically some degree better and they can assist with the comparisons to pick the product and partner that fits your company needs. Keep in mind that there is essentially zero chance that you are the first person to ask many of the questions that you want answers to and a VAR is in a position to service you no matter which product you choose. All of this should help align you to the right fit. Best of luck.

syvolt 4y ago

I tried looking for something like this but ended up doing over a month of sales calls and meetings. One problem is probably that a lot of companies pull enterprise pricing out of their ass (or there's too many confounding factors that make it look like that), and the other big problem was already mentioned, they're trying to maximize your spending.

brk 4y ago

It really depends heavily on the products and industries or verticals they serve. Also, it may depend on their exact GTM strategy, companies that sell primarily through a VAR type of channel are usually more hesitant to disclose pricing, as some of their partners may wrap other services or functions around the offering. Pricing can also vary based on how turn-key the product it. An enterprise CRM, for example, can be really hard to get pricing for as you are likely going to spend more on the implementation at first than on the actual licenses. In those cases the solution is also somewhat like buying insurance, where the expectation is that you have some customized add-ons and things that are specific to your environment.

sokoloff 4y ago

I should make a bookmarklet that changes "call for pricing" to something like: window.location="https://www.google.com/search?q=" + window.location.host.split(".").slice(-2,-1) + "+vs";

comboy 4y ago

Details like what you actually need are less important, but you would definitely need to enter how much your company is worth as an input, if such website existed. If you have enough options though, you can be upfront about it - hey I have a number of services to check, either you give me ballpark given this copypasta or I'm checking the other ones.

1123581321 4y ago

It’ll be good for you to practice cutting these calls short so you can get your quote.

bombcar 4y ago

If they have a "personal/business" tier that has a price, just use that multiplied by the number of seats/licenses. It's ballpark close enough usually.

zainhoda 4y ago
That’s what I would have ordinarily thought but I had a vendor who charged $10/user/mo per user for their “Team” tier but $180,000/year for their “Enterprise” tier with up to 150 users. Made no sense at all.

evilotto 4y ago

To be fair to the annoying "call us" pricing practice, on your end you need to have a ballpark idea of what you want, whether its number of seats, data size, or whatever the product is sized in. Having that makes the calls go faster and can help you and the salesguy save time if there isn't even a chance of a match.

Test0129 4y ago

You likely won't get pricing information out of a company like this. It's safe to assume "Contact Us" is being used as shorthand for a price between expensive and absurdly expensive. Usually companies that do this offer some sort per-company rate based on what you need along with a bunch of additional services. Hate to say it but you're basically only going to find out by going through the sales funnel. Some of them may even turn you down for simply saying "we're evaluating X and would like to know the price".

vehemenz 4y ago

I've had success asking other clients what they pay, assuming they're not a direct competitor of yours. This is easiest at conferences and professional events.

philip1209 4y ago

There's some interesting data in the debt proceedings for the event startup Pollen: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/the-scoop-pollen/ https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/the-scoop-pollen/ Some snippets on their debts, which you cold normalize for their ~150 employees: - Monday.com: ￡515k - AWS: ￡105k - Airtable: ￡7k

celestialcheese 4y ago
Very interesting - although probably difficult to glean any kind of generalizable pricing data because some of those vendors could have let unpaid bills slide longer than others. Also, how is Monday.com owed ￡515k on a company of 315 employees? That's 1.5k/employee, so if it's an annual contract they didn't pay, that's $150/user/month? Seems _wild_ expensive. If that's accurate, no wonder Monday.com is able to spend so much on paid ads.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- matesz 4y ago
  > For those asking "how can a 500-person company generate a ~$500K+, unpaid bill on Monday .com when most of the eng team uses JIRA (it would imply $1,000/person for Monday, which seems high, even for a year): I'm wondering the same. > Asked the company: they've not responded yet. https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1583401575715741696?s=20&t=J2CEsNpLV5o9ycqkXrbrUQ https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1583401575715741696?...

barbariangrunge 4y ago

I use the "if you have to ask the price in order to check whether you can afford it or not, you can't afford it, so don't ask" strategy. The price-hiding tactic is a little rude: jewlery stores helped pioneer it, the idea being to get the customer hooked on the item before they think about price, and to imagine the largest number they might be okay with paying ahead of time, while simultaneously making them unsure whether it's too low or not. I don't like dealing with companies who do that sort of thing and I worry what other curve balls they have in store later on. So I opt out. The reason that you can use this on enterprise sales is that you are theoretically offering something that the enterprise needs, no matter how painful the process is -- and there are typically few competitors for them to turn to. Many of the competitors use the same tactic. Hence, we see it all over in that world.

codegeek 4y ago

Best option is to have both. Some fixed starting prices and then Custom/Enterprise/Contact us. That's what we do for my SAAS where we start at $599/Month (B2B) but our custom/contact us prices can go $50k/Year or even more. Some reasons are custom user count, custom features/integrations, tighter SLAs with dedicated Customer Success Manager (CSM) etc. Gotta charge for all those conveniences.

grantsch 4y ago

Companies do this so they can price discriminate for high margin goods and services

JangoSteve 4y ago

A lot of good feedback here. One additional thought I'd provide is that I wouldn't rule someone out based on a "Contact us for price" button. I'd click the button, let them know what you need, and then let them rule themselves out based on their responses. Sometimes they may give you a price directly in their response (or at least a ballpark), sometimes they may insist on a call. Take the call, but draw the line where you're comfortable (e.g. give me a ballpark after 30 minutes or I'm out - you can be more tactful in your wording). Think about it from the company's perspective. Let's imagine as a company, you do an experiment where you have one landing page that shows the pricing, and another landing page that says "contact us". Let's also imagine that your product is enough of an enterprise solution that no one ever buys it without talking to someone at some point during the evaluation process (even if the pricing is up front, it requires enough of an investment that the customer wants to be absolutely certain it will satisfy their needs both now and as they grow). Finally, let's imagine that you have 3 full-time sales people to handle the incoming communications at whatever step of the evaluation process. Now, if the outcome of this experiment is that the "contact us for pricing" results in 1/5th the incoming contacts, but those then convert twice the rate, you might choose the up-front pricing (2x conversion rate but on 20% of the leads means only 40% the sales compared to up-front pricing). However, what if the 5x incoming contacts is too many for your sales team of 3 to respond, causing the up-front pricing to result in fewer sales with more work? Then you might choose the "contact us for pricing". But what if it's so many more incoming contacts at a consistent enough conversion rate that you can justify adding a 4th and 5th sales person to realize those sales? Then you might choose the up-front pricing. But what if the up-front pricing pigeon-holes you into your beachhead market and makes it more difficult to expand vertically or horizontally, which could lead to a trail-off in the incoming contacts and sales? Then you might choose the "contact us for pricing". The point is, the one that makes the most sense for a company depends on a lot of variables, most of which would be opaque to an outside observer. Being able to tell the difference between a company that has "contact us for pricing" because it made sense for them, compared to one trying to exploit price discrimination (as described by some of the more cynical takes) is next to impossible without talking with them. Even in that scenario though, if they end up giving you a better product for a better price, then being willing to reach out to them could end up being a competitive advantage for your company over another which disqualified them on that basis.

datalopers 4y ago

> I'd like to avoid spending the next month in sales calls. Just exclude them from your search. They're garbage software anyway.

throwayyy479087 4y ago

This isn't for B2B - I've seen this a lot in daycares and high-end cars. Generally, it's a way to signal "if you have to ask, you can't afford it"

smithcoin 4y ago

Seems like a good side project. A database where people could submit their SAAS pricing in a Glassdoor like fashion.

gorkish 4y ago
I find incredible irony in that the companies like Gartner that perform this exact service are all basically "call for bespoke/maximal pricing" as well.

imagine99 4y ago

"Professional" subreddits, such as /r/MSP, as well as the Spiceworks community will have answers for some of those, depending on what kind of SaaS it is exactly. Ask, oftentimes (former) vendor reps or happy/unhappy customers lurk there and are happy to help you out, although their info might be outdated - but it may help for a first orientation. (I, too, consider price-hiding the bane of my existence and wish I could get those days and months of lifetime back that I spend going through useless "demos" and "quick calls with an evangelist/key account manager/person who nopes out at the first technical question".) Another strategy is that you prepare a long-ish text that you email to a - perferrably senior - sales contact at each company, ideally one that has been referred to you (again, the above-mentioned sources may help). Just change the name and first line mentioning their product and outline that "due to internal restructuring" your company will decide yea or nay "on doing a PoC within the next three working days" (i.e. you don't have time to waste on demos), that you are already very familiar with their product in all details from an earlier job, in fact, you want to recommend to your CTO to buy it, and that you wish to receive nothing more than their current pricing for $detailedreqs asap. Be overspecific as to your reqs and specs, so they can't weasel out with "it depends". You might need to go one or two rounds where they try and talk you into doing calls/demos regardless but they will often CC more senior or local reps whose contacts are not public and if you push back repeating what you said in your first email but shorter, they will usually relent, especially if there are competitors in the field and they're getting afraid that the lead may go cold. This strategy works maybe about 78.3% of the time but will likely fail if the SaaS offering does require extensive and bespoke customisation for your organisation. Good luck, I really don't envy you having to go through this, to me it used to be like running the gauntlet.

startupsales 4y ago

I have pricing on my site revpilots.com for various enterprise software that is normally not listed publicly. We'll even get on calls for you to get pricing.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jefc1111 4y ago

I normally find discussions on Reddit for these kinds of things. Recently have had to research Acunetix, Snowflake and some others and have found interesting (if anecdotal) info on Reddit.

pclmulqdq 4y ago

My SaaS has only "Contact Sales" pricing right now because I currently don't have the infrastructure set up to sell to you in any other way. If the SaaS companies are young, they may be in the same situation. You could get a good deal by clicking the button. Generally, the less you charge, the more infrastructure is involved in collecting payment - metered SaaS companies can charge you in increments of a few dollars but are backed by complex billing software, while enterprise sales is an invoice from quickbooks (I'm exaggerating a little bit about the level of automation here, but it's close to this). Personally, the price for my "contact sales" product is a lot less than a typical "enterprise sales" product, with the price range being $10-50k. Some other young SaaS companies I have heard of are lower than that. Conversely, established companies with a "contact sales" button tend to start at $50k/year and go up from there to millions. If you take control of the process during the call, and tell them "no" if they give you BS, you can probably get a price.

paxys 4y ago

I'd say if you don't want to spend a month in sales calls then don't work in procurement. There isn't really a short cut, that's what the job is.

AtNightWeCode 4y ago

No, the only comfort I can give you is that you also have to make deals with companies with list prices. Otherwise you end up paying too much.

0xbadcafebee 4y ago

I tried to get SuSE to tell me how much Rancher was so I could just buy it. I was completely ready to just lay down my credit card. They refused without a sales call. And in fact, it was impossible for me to even schedule a sales call without joining their Slack channel to tell them their website's Contact Us form was broken. The call got bumped like 3 times over 2 months, they didn't schedule a new one. Now I've found out that Rancher's support sucks and SuSE is botching their communication, so I'm going with a competitor. SaaS people: Don't make it hard for me to give you money. At the very least, give me a 30 day trial (of Enterprise features) while we go through your stupid sales dance.

TheTaytay 4y ago

TL;DR: use a SaaS procurement vendor like TropicApp.io or Vendr. Long version: First, my heart goes out to you. I was in charge of a lot of SaaS procurement for a number of years, and even as our company grew and our ability to pay went up, the lack of pricing transparency only became more frustrating to me! It used to be: “if we have to ask, we can’t afford it,” but then it became, “we can likely afford it, but it would be nice to make sure we should even talk to this vendor or industry before sitting through long eye-rolling sales calls.” (Or even worse, the 15 minute sales call with an intern to get you as a lead before you can talk to someone who knows anything.) but my blood pressure is rising, and I digress… To level the playing field, we recently signed up with one of the “SaaS procurement” companies that has made this MUCH more tolerable. We use TropicApp.io, and have been happy with them and how they do business. They help us find and negotiate purchases. Even before we buy something, we can ask them stuff like, “we need a tool to do X. What are people using these days, and what is ballpark pricing and pricing model for a tool like that?” They (and their competitors) charge a percentage of the money they save you. They can’t help with smaller stuff (less than 5k per year), but are helpful with the rest. (Not affiliated with them or any competitors like Vendr.com - just happy that these companies exist now, and wish we’d found them sooner.)

ww520 4y ago

"Contact Us" is called value pricing in enterprise lingo. It means the price will reflect how much "value" the product will provide to your organization. If the product can provide $100M "value" for your company, they will be happy to charge you $10M for the product. That's why they need to talk to you, to find out how much "value" they can provide for you.

SavageBeast 4y ago

“Contact Us” Pricing == Highly Variable Pricing. I personally see it as them inviting me to hear them out then waste some of their time before making a deal more along the lines of my price guidelines. Im about 50% success rate id say. End of month reports are always a good time, End of quarter even better, Triple witching week is the best. Sometimes you get lucky and some middle-manager-muckity-muck is only $X thousands from the bonus target... and thats when you find your deals. Start early and be prepared to wait.

bunabhucan 4y ago
I know an electric utility that had senior folks work on the last day of the financial year to extract these bargains from desperate licensing vendors.

fapi1974 4y ago

G2.com has a lot of pricing for comparison. Not sure if it necessarily shares information not available on the vendor sites, though.

indymike 4y ago

Contact Us Pricing has different meanings based on company size: Newish Companies: they haven't been able to figure out how to price their product yet. Growth Companies: We're revenue optimizing every deal. "Sales Driven" (as opposed to "product driven): We have to justify the existence of our sales team. Hyper competitive companies: I'm not publishing a price because someone will scrape it and beat us by $1. Large Companies: Our pricing is a four-dimensional matrix with multiple elevators, and we need a team of people to figure out which spreadsheet and which tab to look up x and y to price your deal.

rchowe 4y ago
Don't underestimate the ability of small companies to have 4D matrix pricing that nobody can comprehend! It's pretty common in custom manufacturing (which makes sense) but also companies that purchase product/services from others and re-sell them as part of a larger whole. Some folks also don't understand that pricing doesn't have to exactly match your product. I think there is also value for certain lines of business for having a customer meet the sales team and possibly an account manager before using the product, usually if the product has some kind of learning curve or domain specific knowledge where insiders can unlock value.

timhigins 4y ago

capiche.com has some good pricing data and reviews from knowledgeable users.

anonymuscoward 4y ago

If your company is serious about buying that much software your best bet is something like vendr. It'll cost you, but you'll get answers to your pricing questions, and if you're buying, they'll negotiate discounts for you. no need to 'talk to sales'

tenarchits 4y ago

I have found https://sso.tax/ https://sso.tax/ to be helpful.

PaulWaldman 4y ago

There are only three reasons: 1. To allow you to charge customers differently for the same product. 2. If you are offering a highly customized product. 3. To establish value for your product prior to providing pricing. In my experience, #1 is by far the most common for a SaaS. The rationale of "if you have to ask" falls apart because you could just put a high price on your site to filter out the cheapskates. I also find that when evaluating a new product, my first click on their site is the pricing page. It is a semi-standardized way to quickly see the significant features offered without all the verbose prose that you'll find on the product pages.

focusedone 4y ago

blaser-waffle 4y ago

> Is there a website or service that lists cost ranges for enterprise SaaS products? Probably not. Have had good success in the past posting random stuff on reddit, like "I'm paying 12000 / core for Oracle, am I high? Is this common?" in r/sysadmin, and then having people correct me. But for the most part SaaS ain't offer those prices online. Contact someone, set up time for a call, and get prices. This is why vendor managers, sales engineers, solution architects, etc. are a thing.

benrapscallion 4y ago

Capiche.com

tptacek 4y ago

One trick, just to ballpark this --- it probably worked better 10 years ago than today, but I checked a couple vendors and got results --- is to Google the vendor and "GSA price list" (for their FedGov pricing).

fxtentacle 4y ago

Just email them :) Its easy to tell them in the email to not call you back. Plus you can instruct them to include a specific word in their reply subject line so that you can quickly filter to see who read your instructions and who didn't. It's a bit like that concert M&M check.

sdfhbdf 4y ago
> concert M&M check For anyone that does not immediately recognize it refers to a popular trope that Van Halen contractually required venues to always sort M&Ms to not have brown ones. It is said this was their canary (in the coal mine) that was supposed to indicate if the venue took obligations seriously and hence will the concert be safe and up to standards. This has a mixed review on snopes.com so take it with a grain of salt but it's a nice idea: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brown-out/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brown-out/

kazinator 4y ago

"Camels and Rubber Duckies", Joel on Software

more_corn 4y ago

Don’t ever use a service that only offers “contact us” pricing. Done.

Spooky23 4y ago

Find a government contract for the services. Many things are on GSA or state contracts.

NibLer 4y ago

I think that they hide prices so that they can charge you the most that they find suitable for your use case. If you are an enterprise user off-the-shelf product is probably not what you need.

dusted 4y ago

I avoid companies that won't publish their prices because it signals two things: 1. If you're not going to spend time jumping OUR hoopes to talk with us, you're not that important, we don't care about you, little fish. 2. We won't quote our price because we want human-human time with you to maximize our quote based on how dumb you are. (how hard can we scam you out of money). There might be a place in the world for a site where existing customers can anonymously report how much they've been quoted for named services at named companies. It'd be very convenient.

eb0la 4y ago

I bought several "contact us" style software. Usually their licensing is hard to calculate and you will need to buy more licenses upfront from what you think you need just in case. Worst experience was a reporting tool for telecoms that was licensed by port. Devices used to have 4-8 ports but the year before suddenly it was feasible to ship 32-port devices to customers. This made the tool prohibitive. My best experience was when a sales rep just called and told me the pricing range for their product: 5x our budget, without counting cost of migration. It was the most productive sales call I ever had.

effnorwood 4y ago

saasbuyer 4y ago

I'm Ryan -- CEO and co-founder of Vendr.com (YCS19). Since YC, we've become one of the largest software buyers in the world ($2B+ spend processed; 15k+ transactions). But, here's what I don't understand -- why does a company like Vendr even need to exist? Companies flock to us to buy software because they are fed up with "Contact Sales", opaque pricing, expiring discounts, and the games associated with sales. Buyers of software are rapidly opting out of sellers' sales processes, coming to Vendr, and asking us to do it for them. Sales is broken. Today, sellers focus on creating sales processes that maximize the leverage and outcomes for the sellers. This creates friction resulting in avg 90 days sales cycles and 20-25% close rates for sellers. Not good. No wonder sales and marketing expense equals ~50% of revenue. When Vendr's successful, we'll have fixed sales. No more games. Fair pricing, correct and fast buying decisions -- powered by data. This results in a win for the seller (lower cost acquisition; shorter sales cycles) and a win for the buyer (best products win; fair pricing). LMK if you need help with any of the "contact us" pricing -- we can easily answer this for you. ryan@vendr.com