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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,

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.
  - jedberg 4y ago
    > always at least 2 weeks late, as a rule of thumb Oh man! As consultant I hated that. They would pay 90 days late and just say "sorry, we always pay 90 days after we get the invoice". They know I don't have the resources to sue them, nor would I. And they really had no reason to hold it other than making sure they get the interest instead of me. Sure maybe it takes a few days to validate the invoice, but 90 days was ridiculous. Even worse was when I was on the corporate side. I was working with a small vendor and our company had a 90 day wait as policy, but the company refused to deliver the items until they got the money. I really needed the items, so I have to move mountains to get our procurement to cut a check ASAP.
    - chasd00 4y ago
      if the contract your client signed said net-30 then wouldn't a 90 day payment incur 60 days of late fees and another invoice? i feel like you could rinse/repeat that forever. It would be like a subscription to late fees.
      - kube-system 4y ago
        If a customer is paying you late because they think you won't/can't do anything about it, it seems the same disregard could apply to their payment of late fees.
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  Price discrimination is good actually. Why shouldn't you charge the fortune 500 company more than the cash strapped start up? Good for your business, and lets you sell to the startup for less and still have the same revenue.
- indymike 4y ago
  As a reformed former VP of Sales, I can assure that this is exactly how it works, except with much better research than Google.
  - thrwyoilarticle 4y ago
    Could you describe some of the research?
- tevon 4y ago
  This is real too. Prices are never fixed, was one of the first things I learned form my GSBer cofounder. In the "regular" world, the price is usually the price. In the business world it almost never is
- stubish 4y ago
  Oh, it doesn't always mean personalized price gouging. My take was always simply that the product is overpriced to the point the vendor needs to employ a full time salesperson to make you want it. I think that was why I've always avoided making those calls. Not only did I know I was going to be annoyed, I was going to have to pay to be annoyed. "contact us" pricing was always the last option to try, especially from the well known brands.
- e-clinton 4y ago
  Same thought here. If I see “contact us” for pricing, it means you’re gonna try and screw me over somehow. I usually avoid those even when I have a large budget. …hell, if I have to speak to a human when I don’t think it’s necessary, then we probably won’t do business.
cykod 4y ago
So that’s what I used to think (Price hiding to avoid sticker shock) But now I am convinced it’s a little bit the price point but more when there is variability in the pricing, and the pricing is done by a sales team that has flexibility on what they charge you (these companies always will ask for a budget and tailor the quote to what they can squeeze) I take it as a sign that when they do give you a quote, it’s up for negotiation and you should never agree to the first number presented.
- scrollaway 4y ago
  There is variability but in my experience it’s good variability, not bad. Every time I’ve gotten “contact us” pricing I have been presented with a slide deck “this is what we usually charge for companies with your needs”, and the sales call was to allow me a chance to negotiate the price down (or eg lock in a multi year contract for cheaper. But this is nonsensical optimisation imo. At these price points, the ability to negotiate should be evident to anyone who has bought such products before.
bilekas 4y ago
Yeah maybe I'm a bit more cynical than you but the idea of contact us pricing for me has always been "dependa how much money you have and how much we can squeeze" also the idea of guaging how "critical" the service is for you. It seems so sleezy in the way that sales generally gets a bad reputation. There shouldn't be any problem with having the pricing on the site if it's all above board. That way you're actually reducing the wasted hours of sales people who have to determine if you're even a potential customer.
- lazide 4y ago
  Those sales people do ‘squeeze’ out a lot of $$$, and it’s also how they often get competitive and product intelligence. What other products is the person using, what expectations/requirements do they have that we might or might not be meeting, etc.
- mozman 4y ago
  Vendor list pricing is absurd. Real story but using made up numbers below: I spoke with a vendor last week who came in at 500k. I told them my budget was 250k, price came back at 255k.
  - duncan-donuts 4y ago
    Then your renewal comes up and you’ve already spent another million in salaries and bespoke shit to make it work for you and the sales guy hits you with 500k again because you’re in too deep.
    - to11mtm 4y ago
      Bingo
    - stubish 4y ago
      Cisco was legendary around here (20+ years ago when I was around networking). They would win almost every tender, often with quotes below cost if that is what it took. And everyone in the know knew you would be paying much, much more over the next few years with support costs, renewals, etc. The first hit is free.
macspoofing 4y ago
>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. Not quite .. their "Enterprise" package only has a "Contact us" option (no pricing details).
- sam_bristow 4y ago
  I'm fine with having a "Contact Is" at the top end of a pricing table. At that point you've probably got some pretty unique requirements and there's likely some level of customisation involved.
maccard 4y ago
> 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) I'm working at a VC funded startup and fielding calls with "contact us" pricing, and while I've certainly seen some of those numbers floated, I saw just as many reasonably priced options that wanted to get on a sales call to try and upsell/make the case for going with them.
mc32 4y ago
In an odd twist, We've had calls where the provider's questions almost asked we prove we should onboard their solution. I guess there are people who try to onboard a wrong solution and then bad-mouth a provider as not solving their need, but I think that could be "solved" with trials --that most of these solutions provide anyway.
rco8786 4y ago
> due to the idea that potential customers will immediately click away if the price seems too high That's not how I read these at all. "Contact Us" means the company doesn't have set pricing but rather will have a sales person/department that will structure a specific deal and negotiate a contract for your business's specific needs.
- autoexec 4y ago
  I read it as: the company doesn't have set pricing but rather has a sales person/department that will charge you more than the next person for the exact same product/service if they have any reason to suspect they can get away with it after learning as much as they can about your finances and only after wasting your time on a high pressure sales pitch. If someone refuses to openly list prices they're either: - Embarrassed by the amount of money they're charging - Aware they charge more than others and don't want to let you comparison shop easily - Planning on setting as high a price as possible depending on how much you can be fleeced into paying
  - kube-system 4y ago
    Enterprise SaaS customers are notorious for demanding one-off features, special packages, customizations, or hundreds of hours of meetings. For complicated enterprise products where these requests are inevitable, special pricing is inevitable. There's a large and very lucrative industry around just implementing SaaS software.
    - autoexec 4y ago
      You're right that for purely custom solutions it's understandable, but a base price could often be made public for a lot of products and services that don't offer one. Certainly anyone asking for something special expects to have to negotiate on what that's going to cost them above the standard price.
      - kube-system 4y ago
bachmeier 4y ago
> 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. I don't understand this viewpoint (which I've seen numerous times). If that's all it is, you can scare those customers away by posting a price, as opposed to having some of them call and hang up on your salesperson when they get a quote.
hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
I’m interested in this level of pricing. What are the breakpoints typically? Per-user, $-per-(record|gb|request), then ‘do what you want site wide’, is there any other aspects other than support / consulting times, etc?
RajT88 4y ago
Having worked for an "enterprise" software biz, this is often because different customers can pay wildly different prices for the same software licenses. Often tailored less based on volume discounts or license type, and more around a customer's ability to pay.
- kube-system 4y ago
  And also based upon how much of a PITA the customer is. Sales cycles, compliance documentation, configuration, training, support, etc, can really vary between customers.
yamtaddle 4y ago
Don't forget that "contact us" pricing also gives vendor managers something to do, and the ability to brag about whatever discount they negotiate (and it hardly matters if everyone gets that "discount"). It's also the case that if something goes wrong the first question is often "do we have a contact at X?" and if you've gone through the "contact us" pricing dance, the answer is probably "yes", or at least "maybe', while if you use self-serve public-pricing plans, the answer is probably "no". Managers like having a named person to bug about problems, so the vendor manager gets to look more competent if they have one, even if the outcome's the same as if they didn't. Besides, all pricing is "contact us" for enterprises. They don't pay what's on the sticker, even if there is one.
- autoexec 4y ago
  > It's also the case that if something goes wrong the first question is often "do we have a contact at X?" and if you've gone through the "contact us" pricing dance, the answer is probably "yes" If you pay for a product or service and when something goes wrong your only contact is some jerk in sales that means you fucked up bad. Support options and contacts should have been determined and documented long before you spend a single cent.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    You usually end up introduced to one or more highish-level support and/or integration engineers as part of the sales process. If their sales folks don't volunteer to drag one or more into the conversation, they probably will if you ask.
- chillfox 4y ago
  Last time I had to deal with the contact at x due to something going wrong they were worse than useless. They broke the product with an update and when we asked to roll it back they organised a full sales team which was presented to us as a call with engineering, except they were trying to sell us on another product to solve a different problem and just ignored all questions about the product we had bought.
malfist 4y ago
Counterpoint: https://www.spacex.com/rideshare/ https://www.spacex.com/rideshare/ SpaceX publicly lists all their prices. If they can list a price tag for a falcon heavy it $97m on their website, these crappy SaaS vendors can list their prices too.
- WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  The keyword here is estimated. That’s only a ballpark number. I think they did that because they were severely undercutting the competition and they want people who wouldn’t have thought about it to call their sales team. It’s not the final price.
  - clnq 4y ago
    Estimated is fantastic. That's almost all I need before deciding who to buy practically identical SaaS from.
    - malfist 4y ago
      Exactly. These SaaS products all what to try and trap you into sunk cost fallacies. Estimates would be fantastic.
imagine99 4y ago
> As a general rule, any software which requires "contact us" is going to be somewhere between $50k and $750k I really wish that were the case. Alas, more and more sellers think it makes them look cool and enterprise-y if they go the "contact us" route. Possibly the most ridiculous I encountered was a browser plugin startup offering that ended up costing something like $2/month/user with a 20 user minimum but even during the demo they were all about "Fortune 500 this and national ISPs that". As far as actual very large enterprises are concerned (pardon the pun), there might even be some truth to that: I know procurement guys who would only buy if they got the white-glove/wine-and-dine treatment and would have never bought something with a corporate credit card on a website that said "click to buy 35,000 licenses now" (you can do that with Atlassian IIRC). Fair enough. But for 99% of companies (i.e. SMB) it's just annoying to the extreme, especially if you have to do this more than once per year because your org is restructuring, your CTO is actually the CFO and reads marketing whitepapers and case studies to follow the latest tech fads, or you're in consulting. I say, offer both: An SMB plan with listed pricing (segment further at your leisure) and an Enterprise option with "call us". If you don't want SMB business, be honest about it and say "enterprise only, we only do bespoke, don't call if your budget is <50k".
- reaperducer 4y ago
  it's just annoying to the extreme I once had to find software options for a company I worked for. I had a deadline to meet for that, plus my regular duties. That meant that any company that had "Call for pricing" didn't make the cut. I don't have time for that. We ended up spending $120,000 on the solution I chose. I don't know if we could have gotten a better deal from another vendor, because they wanted to play games. I don't have time for games. The company that was honest and up-front about the pricing got the contract, which I know has renewed several times since then.
  - jklm 4y ago
    How did this work? Did they put $10,000/mo on their website?
j0hnyl 4y ago
Where is this general rule of $50k-$750k established? I think there are tons of saas products that target enterprises that are as low as ~$2k/month and up and require "contact us".
twawaaay 4y ago
There are also companies that do not really have a price list, they will just think up the price depending on what they think you are willing to pay.
marcosdumay 4y ago
> 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. I have stopped government buying processes (yep, plural) because the price isn't available and they weren't priority enough to spend months on price research. With some companies, it is a larger time waster than the entire documenting the requirements, publishing it, answering questions, and watching the auction.
grumple 4y ago
For the average SaaS I suspect this hurts sales. As someone who often gets to choose what services we pay for, any service where I have to send an email, or worse, involve our finance or accounts payable department and get non-technical people involved at the very start, it's a huge disincentive.
WastingMyTime89 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. That’s one way of seeing it which is not necessarily generous. Another is “You and us both know there is no one size fit all standard solution here so we can’t give you an off the rack price. Call us so we can take your measure and we will start talking about how this bespoke thing might cost.”
yellowapple 4y ago
I mentioned this in a different HN thread today, but I'm gonna say it again anyway: if I can get a publicly-available "standard" price for launching something into outer fucking space¹, it's absolutely ridiculous that I can't get the same for something multiple orders of magnitude cheaper. Will that "standard" price be negotiated? Sure. Whatever. Just throw out some number instead of forcing the buyer and seller to mutually waste each other's time on basic information gathering. ---- ¹: https://www.spacex.com/media/Capabilities&Services.pdf https://www.spacex.com/media/Capabilities&Services.pdf
- site-packages1 4y ago
  I think the comment you’re responding to answers your response. Pricing isn’t opaque because they cannot determine a standard price, but because they don’t want to scare people away. I’m expecting spacex is different because we already know intuitively that launching something is expensive and we know there are only a small number of vendors with which to do so. So space launch companies probably don’t have the same issue…
  - yellowapple 4y ago
    > they don’t want to scare people away If that price tag is big enough to "scare away" a customer, then that'll be true with or without the extra contact info collection and sales call(s) and email spam. Like I said: might as well not have the vendor and customer mutually waste each others' time with a bunch of sales ceremony that has no hope of actually producing a sale.
- vitiral 4y ago
  I'm a big SpaceX fan, but I know the prices are published for the fans (they make good PR). For those looking to launch things into space calling the three existing providers is not a serious barrier to entry.
hodgesrm 4y ago
Sometimes 'contact us' for pricing is just a way to get potential customers to talk. My company has standard pricing for all offerings (including cloud operation and support services) but we have said 'Contact Us' for years. The reason: we have a better chance of closing if we actually interact with prospects. We don't charge more for the privilege. Just $0.02 from my personal experience.
lumost 4y ago
It took me a long time to understand why companies price this way. The reality is that many viable SaaS businesses have fewer than 100 customers. If each customer pays you 1 million a year that's a hundred million dollar a year SaaS business commanding a valuation of 500 million dollars or more. The problem is that this SaaS business needs to find a pricing model which net's them 1 million per customer. Charging too little means the business will starve, too much means that customers won't sign up. Sales & Contract negotiations can help arrive at the right number. Guessing the pricing model after 1-2 customers can break the business if you don't have infinite VC money.
brianwawok 4y ago
FWIW there are SaaS products in my field with "contact us" pricing that start at 1-1.5k per month. But yah, they for sure aren't going to be $49 or whatever a month.
juancn 4y ago
There's also the ROI argument, enterprise pricing in many cases comes with a ROI estimate that requires quite a bit of involvement in understanding the potential customer use case. The trick is to make the case that the price is cheap for them, given that they get more out of the software than what it costs.

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.
- jedberg 4y ago
  > always at least 2 weeks late, as a rule of thumb Oh man! As consultant I hated that. They would pay 90 days late and just say "sorry, we always pay 90 days after we get the invoice". They know I don't have the resources to sue them, nor would I. And they really had no reason to hold it other than making sure they get the interest instead of me. Sure maybe it takes a few days to validate the invoice, but 90 days was ridiculous. Even worse was when I was on the corporate side. I was working with a small vendor and our company had a 90 day wait as policy, but the company refused to deliver the items until they got the money. I really needed the items, so I have to move mountains to get our procurement to cut a check ASAP.
  - chasd00 4y ago
    if the contract your client signed said net-30 then wouldn't a 90 day payment incur 60 days of late fees and another invoice? i feel like you could rinse/repeat that forever. It would be like a subscription to late fees.
    - kube-system 4y ago
      If a customer is paying you late because they think you won't/can't do anything about it, it seems the same disregard could apply to their payment of late fees.
colinmhayes 4y ago
Price discrimination is good actually. Why shouldn't you charge the fortune 500 company more than the cash strapped start up? Good for your business, and lets you sell to the startup for less and still have the same revenue.
indymike 4y ago
As a reformed former VP of Sales, I can assure that this is exactly how it works, except with much better research than Google.
- thrwyoilarticle 4y ago
  Could you describe some of the research?
tevon 4y ago
This is real too. Prices are never fixed, was one of the first things I learned form my GSBer cofounder. In the "regular" world, the price is usually the price. In the business world it almost never is
stubish 4y ago
Oh, it doesn't always mean personalized price gouging. My take was always simply that the product is overpriced to the point the vendor needs to employ a full time salesperson to make you want it. I think that was why I've always avoided making those calls. Not only did I know I was going to be annoyed, I was going to have to pay to be annoyed. "contact us" pricing was always the last option to try, especially from the well known brands.
e-clinton 4y ago
Same thought here. If I see “contact us” for pricing, it means you’re gonna try and screw me over somehow. I usually avoid those even when I have a large budget. …hell, if I have to speak to a human when I don’t think it’s necessary, then we probably won’t do business.

cykod 4y ago

So that’s what I used to think (Price hiding to avoid sticker shock) But now I am convinced it’s a little bit the price point but more when there is variability in the pricing, and the pricing is done by a sales team that has flexibility on what they charge you (these companies always will ask for a budget and tailor the quote to what they can squeeze) I take it as a sign that when they do give you a quote, it’s up for negotiation and you should never agree to the first number presented.

scrollaway 4y ago
There is variability but in my experience it’s good variability, not bad. Every time I’ve gotten “contact us” pricing I have been presented with a slide deck “this is what we usually charge for companies with your needs”, and the sales call was to allow me a chance to negotiate the price down (or eg lock in a multi year contract for cheaper. But this is nonsensical optimisation imo. At these price points, the ability to negotiate should be evident to anyone who has bought such products before.

bilekas 4y ago

Yeah maybe I'm a bit more cynical than you but the idea of contact us pricing for me has always been "dependa how much money you have and how much we can squeeze" also the idea of guaging how "critical" the service is for you. It seems so sleezy in the way that sales generally gets a bad reputation. There shouldn't be any problem with having the pricing on the site if it's all above board. That way you're actually reducing the wasted hours of sales people who have to determine if you're even a potential customer.

lazide 4y ago
Those sales people do ‘squeeze’ out a lot of $$$, and it’s also how they often get competitive and product intelligence. What other products is the person using, what expectations/requirements do they have that we might or might not be meeting, etc.
mozman 4y ago
Vendor list pricing is absurd. Real story but using made up numbers below: I spoke with a vendor last week who came in at 500k. I told them my budget was 250k, price came back at 255k.
- duncan-donuts 4y ago
  Then your renewal comes up and you’ve already spent another million in salaries and bespoke shit to make it work for you and the sales guy hits you with 500k again because you’re in too deep.
  - to11mtm 4y ago
    Bingo
  - stubish 4y ago
    Cisco was legendary around here (20+ years ago when I was around networking). They would win almost every tender, often with quotes below cost if that is what it took. And everyone in the know knew you would be paying much, much more over the next few years with support costs, renewals, etc. The first hit is free.

macspoofing 4y ago

>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. Not quite .. their "Enterprise" package only has a "Contact us" option (no pricing details).

sam_bristow 4y ago
I'm fine with having a "Contact Is" at the top end of a pricing table. At that point you've probably got some pretty unique requirements and there's likely some level of customisation involved.

maccard 4y ago

> 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) I'm working at a VC funded startup and fielding calls with "contact us" pricing, and while I've certainly seen some of those numbers floated, I saw just as many reasonably priced options that wanted to get on a sales call to try and upsell/make the case for going with them.

mc32 4y ago

In an odd twist, We've had calls where the provider's questions almost asked we prove we should onboard their solution. I guess there are people who try to onboard a wrong solution and then bad-mouth a provider as not solving their need, but I think that could be "solved" with trials --that most of these solutions provide anyway.

rco8786 4y ago

> due to the idea that potential customers will immediately click away if the price seems too high That's not how I read these at all. "Contact Us" means the company doesn't have set pricing but rather will have a sales person/department that will structure a specific deal and negotiate a contract for your business's specific needs.

autoexec 4y ago
I read it as: the company doesn't have set pricing but rather has a sales person/department that will charge you more than the next person for the exact same product/service if they have any reason to suspect they can get away with it after learning as much as they can about your finances and only after wasting your time on a high pressure sales pitch. If someone refuses to openly list prices they're either: - Embarrassed by the amount of money they're charging - Aware they charge more than others and don't want to let you comparison shop easily - Planning on setting as high a price as possible depending on how much you can be fleeced into paying
- kube-system 4y ago
  Enterprise SaaS customers are notorious for demanding one-off features, special packages, customizations, or hundreds of hours of meetings. For complicated enterprise products where these requests are inevitable, special pricing is inevitable. There's a large and very lucrative industry around just implementing SaaS software.
  - autoexec 4y ago
    You're right that for purely custom solutions it's understandable, but a base price could often be made public for a lot of products and services that don't offer one. Certainly anyone asking for something special expects to have to negotiate on what that's going to cost them above the standard price.
    - kube-system 4y ago

bachmeier 4y ago

> 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. I don't understand this viewpoint (which I've seen numerous times). If that's all it is, you can scare those customers away by posting a price, as opposed to having some of them call and hang up on your salesperson when they get a quote.

hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago

I’m interested in this level of pricing. What are the breakpoints typically? Per-user, $-per-(record|gb|request), then ‘do what you want site wide’, is there any other aspects other than support / consulting times, etc?

RajT88 4y ago

Having worked for an "enterprise" software biz, this is often because different customers can pay wildly different prices for the same software licenses. Often tailored less based on volume discounts or license type, and more around a customer's ability to pay.

kube-system 4y ago
And also based upon how much of a PITA the customer is. Sales cycles, compliance documentation, configuration, training, support, etc, can really vary between customers.

yamtaddle 4y ago

Don't forget that "contact us" pricing also gives vendor managers something to do, and the ability to brag about whatever discount they negotiate (and it hardly matters if everyone gets that "discount"). It's also the case that if something goes wrong the first question is often "do we have a contact at X?" and if you've gone through the "contact us" pricing dance, the answer is probably "yes", or at least "maybe', while if you use self-serve public-pricing plans, the answer is probably "no". Managers like having a named person to bug about problems, so the vendor manager gets to look more competent if they have one, even if the outcome's the same as if they didn't. Besides, all pricing is "contact us" for enterprises. They don't pay what's on the sticker, even if there is one.

autoexec 4y ago
> It's also the case that if something goes wrong the first question is often "do we have a contact at X?" and if you've gone through the "contact us" pricing dance, the answer is probably "yes" If you pay for a product or service and when something goes wrong your only contact is some jerk in sales that means you fucked up bad. Support options and contacts should have been determined and documented long before you spend a single cent.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  You usually end up introduced to one or more highish-level support and/or integration engineers as part of the sales process. If their sales folks don't volunteer to drag one or more into the conversation, they probably will if you ask.
chillfox 4y ago
Last time I had to deal with the contact at x due to something going wrong they were worse than useless. They broke the product with an update and when we asked to roll it back they organised a full sales team which was presented to us as a call with engineering, except they were trying to sell us on another product to solve a different problem and just ignored all questions about the product we had bought.

malfist 4y ago

Counterpoint: https://www.spacex.com/rideshare/ https://www.spacex.com/rideshare/ SpaceX publicly lists all their prices. If they can list a price tag for a falcon heavy it $97m on their website, these crappy SaaS vendors can list their prices too.

WastingMyTime89 4y ago
The keyword here is estimated. That’s only a ballpark number. I think they did that because they were severely undercutting the competition and they want people who wouldn’t have thought about it to call their sales team. It’s not the final price.
- clnq 4y ago
  Estimated is fantastic. That's almost all I need before deciding who to buy practically identical SaaS from.
  - malfist 4y ago
    Exactly. These SaaS products all what to try and trap you into sunk cost fallacies. Estimates would be fantastic.

imagine99 4y ago

> As a general rule, any software which requires "contact us" is going to be somewhere between $50k and $750k I really wish that were the case. Alas, more and more sellers think it makes them look cool and enterprise-y if they go the "contact us" route. Possibly the most ridiculous I encountered was a browser plugin startup offering that ended up costing something like $2/month/user with a 20 user minimum but even during the demo they were all about "Fortune 500 this and national ISPs that". As far as actual very large enterprises are concerned (pardon the pun), there might even be some truth to that: I know procurement guys who would only buy if they got the white-glove/wine-and-dine treatment and would have never bought something with a corporate credit card on a website that said "click to buy 35,000 licenses now" (you can do that with Atlassian IIRC). Fair enough. But for 99% of companies (i.e. SMB) it's just annoying to the extreme, especially if you have to do this more than once per year because your org is restructuring, your CTO is actually the CFO and reads marketing whitepapers and case studies to follow the latest tech fads, or you're in consulting. I say, offer both: An SMB plan with listed pricing (segment further at your leisure) and an Enterprise option with "call us". If you don't want SMB business, be honest about it and say "enterprise only, we only do bespoke, don't call if your budget is <50k".

reaperducer 4y ago
it's just annoying to the extreme I once had to find software options for a company I worked for. I had a deadline to meet for that, plus my regular duties. That meant that any company that had "Call for pricing" didn't make the cut. I don't have time for that. We ended up spending $120,000 on the solution I chose. I don't know if we could have gotten a better deal from another vendor, because they wanted to play games. I don't have time for games. The company that was honest and up-front about the pricing got the contract, which I know has renewed several times since then.
- jklm 4y ago
  How did this work? Did they put $10,000/mo on their website?

j0hnyl 4y ago

Where is this general rule of $50k-$750k established? I think there are tons of saas products that target enterprises that are as low as ~$2k/month and up and require "contact us".

twawaaay 4y ago

There are also companies that do not really have a price list, they will just think up the price depending on what they think you are willing to pay.

marcosdumay 4y ago

> 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. I have stopped government buying processes (yep, plural) because the price isn't available and they weren't priority enough to spend months on price research. With some companies, it is a larger time waster than the entire documenting the requirements, publishing it, answering questions, and watching the auction.

grumple 4y ago

For the average SaaS I suspect this hurts sales. As someone who often gets to choose what services we pay for, any service where I have to send an email, or worse, involve our finance or accounts payable department and get non-technical people involved at the very start, it's a huge disincentive.

WastingMyTime89 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. That’s one way of seeing it which is not necessarily generous. Another is “You and us both know there is no one size fit all standard solution here so we can’t give you an off the rack price. Call us so we can take your measure and we will start talking about how this bespoke thing might cost.”

yellowapple 4y ago

I mentioned this in a different HN thread today, but I'm gonna say it again anyway: if I can get a publicly-available "standard" price for launching something into outer fucking space¹, it's absolutely ridiculous that I can't get the same for something multiple orders of magnitude cheaper. Will that "standard" price be negotiated? Sure. Whatever. Just throw out some number instead of forcing the buyer and seller to mutually waste each other's time on basic information gathering. ---- ¹: https://www.spacex.com/media/Capabilities&Services.pdf https://www.spacex.com/media/Capabilities&Services.pdf

site-packages1 4y ago
I think the comment you’re responding to answers your response. Pricing isn’t opaque because they cannot determine a standard price, but because they don’t want to scare people away. I’m expecting spacex is different because we already know intuitively that launching something is expensive and we know there are only a small number of vendors with which to do so. So space launch companies probably don’t have the same issue…
- yellowapple 4y ago
  > they don’t want to scare people away If that price tag is big enough to "scare away" a customer, then that'll be true with or without the extra contact info collection and sales call(s) and email spam. Like I said: might as well not have the vendor and customer mutually waste each others' time with a bunch of sales ceremony that has no hope of actually producing a sale.
vitiral 4y ago
I'm a big SpaceX fan, but I know the prices are published for the fans (they make good PR). For those looking to launch things into space calling the three existing providers is not a serious barrier to entry.

hodgesrm 4y ago

Sometimes 'contact us' for pricing is just a way to get potential customers to talk. My company has standard pricing for all offerings (including cloud operation and support services) but we have said 'Contact Us' for years. The reason: we have a better chance of closing if we actually interact with prospects. We don't charge more for the privilege. Just $0.02 from my personal experience.

lumost 4y ago

It took me a long time to understand why companies price this way. The reality is that many viable SaaS businesses have fewer than 100 customers. If each customer pays you 1 million a year that's a hundred million dollar a year SaaS business commanding a valuation of 500 million dollars or more. The problem is that this SaaS business needs to find a pricing model which net's them 1 million per customer. Charging too little means the business will starve, too much means that customers won't sign up. Sales & Contract negotiations can help arrive at the right number. Guessing the pricing model after 1-2 customers can break the business if you don't have infinite VC money.

brianwawok 4y ago

FWIW there are SaaS products in my field with "contact us" pricing that start at 1-1.5k per month. But yah, they for sure aren't going to be $49 or whatever a month.

juancn 4y ago

There's also the ROI argument, enterprise pricing in many cases comes with a ROI estimate that requires quite a bit of involvement in understanding the potential customer use case. The trick is to make the case that the price is cheap for them, given that they get more out of the software than what it costs.