7 ms·

It is! So many people (both potential large customers and that long tail of small customers) will not click "contact a sales associate" and just leave when you

It is! So many people (both potential large customers and that long tail of small customers) will not click "contact a sales associate" and just leave when you won't say how much a thing costs. Even just a ballpark is helpful. As an industrial engineer, I deal with this all the time - I don't have time to go to lunch with you and talk about one of 300 components on my machine, but is your fancy gizmo worth it? When the tech specs are public PDFs, that's great, when they're locked behind an account creation email flow to spam me later, that sucks (and you'll get a company disposable email), when the account doesn't get created until your sales rep looks at my company website to estimate how much money you can take us for, it's too late; I've already designed in something else. And what's the price difference between the standard and deluxe models? Is it 20%, or a factor of 3? If your product is moderately compelling but has public pricing, you're in the running, if I have to wait for a quote you'd better be really compelling. I might be one of those long tail customers for SkyFi, my Dad's birthday is coming up and I think he'd love a print of a satellite photo of his cottage on the lake up north...it needs to be better than Google Maps, but I'd never make it through a manual sales pipeline.

Sebb767 4y ago
> It is! So many people (both potential large customers and that long tail of small customers) will not click "contact a sales associate" and just leave when you won't say how much a thing costs. Yes! Especially since 'contact us' can usually be translated as 'not financially viable for a private person' (or even small company). Even if pricing is not easy to say (like for companies doing custom car mods etc.), at least a rough idea or example projects with their costs help to know whether you could reasonably afford something.
- Gemoto 4y ago
  My team has 7 people and my company has 100.000 employees. My budget as that single team is not 'just getting the company credit card out and paying 5k / year for some services I wanna use'. I'm pretty sure this type of practice is just stupid and we do see how much easier it is to just be allowed to click a VM on was, gcp and co in comparison to all of these 'contactnus for pricing shit'.
  - teamskyfi 4y ago
    Can you elaborate on what you'd like to see?
    - jjeaff 4y ago
      Not op, but I'm sure, like many people, are saying they would like to see advertised, upfront pricing.
      - lukefischer 4y ago
        We clearly list our pricing on the app and our website and are the first to do that. On the website we display our pricing. When in the app you constantly see the pricing very clearly...if you desire a 5km2 area you'll see that price, 6km2 you'll see that price, etc etc. The fact that we've created an application that allows infinite variability on size of the image requested with multiple sensor types there is no way to list pricing for every scenario. I'd like to know more about what you'd like to see to make it simpler as we are always striving for perfection.
        IanCal 4y ago
        I think the chain of comments has been saying that they want others to do what you're doing, and complaining about the common practice of hiding costs, rather than any complaint about your pricing.
        lukefischer 4y ago
        Got it, thanks IanCal
        jjeaff 4y ago
        Yes, correct. I didn't realize you were the main OP. I very much appreciate the upfront pricing and have almost never given a "call for pricing" company a second thought.
- mgfist 4y ago
  If SpaceX (https://www.spacex.com/rideshare/ https://www.spacex.com/rideshare/) can have public pricing so can everyone else.
- KyeRussell 4y ago
  Yep. Until recently I worked for a profitable yet bootstrapped small business. Five people. No plans for insane hypergrowth, and in an industry where it’s very unlikely we’re going to be a billion-dollar company. If I felt myself getting pulled into high-touch sales for a SaaS product, I’d move on to the next thing. I’m not an idiot. I know it’s not profitable for you to have salespeople talking to people with a budget like mine. So don’t pretend that you will. The worst thing you can do is actually follow through and contact me, because it tells me that your business model is such that I’m going to get screwed in a couple years time, so I’m just as uninterested.
roamerz 4y ago
This. I evaluate lots of software in my position. If you don’t post at least ballpark pricing on your public webpage and you do not have a feature I cannot live without I’m talking to one of your competitors that does. Every time.
- bookofjoe 4y ago
  Concur. This is so obvious to me I do not understand why not posting a price — no matter what it is — is still considered good business practice. Perhaps once upon a time before the internet but no longer.
  - blowski 4y ago
    It’s not that they have a fixed price they’re not sharing with you. They want to estimate how much you’ll pay first - look at Crunchbase, etc. I’m not saying it’s a good idea but there are plenty of smart cookies who seem to think it maximises revenue. If you want to counteract, have a shitty little startup with no funding and ask for the quote for them.
    - tshaddox 4y ago
      I suspect it’s primarily a mix of three things. The first is price discrimination, like you mention. The second is wanting to have some control over the sales process (price anchoring, tempering sticker stock, etc.). The third is related to the second: focusing inbound sales efforts by subtly communicating that “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it” for a large chunk of price-sensitive customers.
      - lukefischer 4y ago
        anytime you hear "custom quote" it means a sales person is try to maximize his or her value out of you
        roamerz 4y ago
toss1 4y ago
>> will not click "contact a sales associate" and just leave when you won't say how much a thing costs. THIS!! Having run small businesses in several technology industries, I cannot emphasize how much this is true. I very well understand that pricing can be complex. But if you cannot give me even an order of magnitude as to whether your prices are even remotely feasible for me or my customer's project, I likely don't have the time or motivation to find out. Yes, I get it, you think your likelihood of sales is better if I talk to someone and they can pitch me on how wonderful your stuff is. Bullshirt. Maybe one in 500 times is that true. You are wasting my time and yours. And, no this is not a filter to weed out the small players. My small shops have done work for anything from individuals to the largest multinational corps and governments. If your product is a fit, I can get the budget. But putting in that kind of wall is just offputting. This is very much like how the real estate industry used to treat the address of a property as a state secret, as if nothing is ever a 'drive-by', the sale will be lost if they can't talk with the customer, blah, blah, blah. Then the dam finally broke, and now they all put addresses and maps, and guess what? They save themselves tons of time because the buyers self-qualify! They check out the places themselves, and only call when it already looks like a good fit. Sales and marketing types really can get stuck in naive wrong ideas for decades...
teamskyfi 4y ago
The pricing page on our website is just the start. If you visit the desktop or download the mobile app (https://www.skyfi.com/download-app https://www.skyfi.com/download-app), you will see that we have dynamic pricing in-app. As you change the size of your area of interest (AOI), the price immediately changes. We are 100% focused on the UX for the end-user and will work hard to keep the purchasing process seamless. User feedback like these conversations is helpful.
- LegitShady 4y ago
  I'm not going to download and install your app to discover pricing either. There's a fair chance you can't get me to install your app ever, and the more of your service is tied to it, the less likely I am to use your service at all.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    Their website has similar functionality where you can highlight an area on the map and it immediately tells you how much the photo will cost, updating the price as you tweak options.
  - whstl 4y ago
    Doesn't seem to need a download: https://app.skyfi.com/explore https://app.skyfi.com/explore
    - LegitShady 4y ago
      thats actually pretty good
- bunabhucan 4y ago
  Is there no way to get a preview of the resolution and "look" of the image being processed? The preview is low resolution but could you unhide a random 100mx100m section to show it? From the preview I wouldn't pay for what I could see. I work with GIS and there are lots of aerial photos with crisp resolution of details but the season or lighting that day or color processing makes it look like a "bad photo."
CPLX 4y ago
> I might be one of those long tail customers for SkyFi, my Dad's birthday is coming up and I think he'd love a print of a satellite photo of his cottage on the lake up north ...it needs to be better than Google Maps It's not, it's drastically worse than Google Maps, not even comparable. That was my use case as well, I bought images (at the highest offered resolution) of my house upstate and the place I got married, thinking they'd be nice little framed items, and they're completely unusable. Google maps is probably 10-50x sharper. It's a confusing product. I guess there's a use case of tracking a something like how many warehouses your competitor has built, or avalanches, or forest fires, or all sorts of time sensitive things, but I feel like they could do a way better job of actually explaining what they are actually selling.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- int_19h 4y ago
  Google Maps uses aerial photos past a certain level of magnification, if it is available in a given area, even if it's still labelled as "satellite". If you compare areas where there are no such photos - e.g. large natural parks - the hi-res samples on their website don't look any worse to me than Google.
  - kraseng 4y ago
    Absolutely! Google uses aerial for popular locations (large cities). We will get into aerial in the next few months. (I am affiliated with SkyFi - CTO)
jandrese 4y ago
This so much. If I'm evaluating half a dozen different possible options for a product I'm not going to strike up a relationship with every single salesperson just to get the damn BOM line. Especially if they can't even get you a price without generating a full up purchase order which takes 2-3 days for no good reason.
boojums 4y ago
> photo as present I looked into something similar. If the photo only needs to be somewhat recent I would recommend plane photography. My state does a yearly plane survey, so I used that. If you know anyone in geotech or environmental engineering, they can probably point you in the right direction.

Sebb767 4y ago

> It is! So many people (both potential large customers and that long tail of small customers) will not click "contact a sales associate" and just leave when you won't say how much a thing costs. Yes! Especially since 'contact us' can usually be translated as 'not financially viable for a private person' (or even small company). Even if pricing is not easy to say (like for companies doing custom car mods etc.), at least a rough idea or example projects with their costs help to know whether you could reasonably afford something.

Gemoto 4y ago
My team has 7 people and my company has 100.000 employees. My budget as that single team is not 'just getting the company credit card out and paying 5k / year for some services I wanna use'. I'm pretty sure this type of practice is just stupid and we do see how much easier it is to just be allowed to click a VM on was, gcp and co in comparison to all of these 'contactnus for pricing shit'.
- teamskyfi 4y ago
  Can you elaborate on what you'd like to see?
  - jjeaff 4y ago
    Not op, but I'm sure, like many people, are saying they would like to see advertised, upfront pricing.
    - lukefischer 4y ago
      We clearly list our pricing on the app and our website and are the first to do that. On the website we display our pricing. When in the app you constantly see the pricing very clearly...if you desire a 5km2 area you'll see that price, 6km2 you'll see that price, etc etc. The fact that we've created an application that allows infinite variability on size of the image requested with multiple sensor types there is no way to list pricing for every scenario. I'd like to know more about what you'd like to see to make it simpler as we are always striving for perfection.
      - IanCal 4y ago
        I think the chain of comments has been saying that they want others to do what you're doing, and complaining about the common practice of hiding costs, rather than any complaint about your pricing.
        lukefischer 4y ago
        Got it, thanks IanCal
        jjeaff 4y ago
        Yes, correct. I didn't realize you were the main OP. I very much appreciate the upfront pricing and have almost never given a "call for pricing" company a second thought.
mgfist 4y ago
If SpaceX (https://www.spacex.com/rideshare/ https://www.spacex.com/rideshare/) can have public pricing so can everyone else.
KyeRussell 4y ago
Yep. Until recently I worked for a profitable yet bootstrapped small business. Five people. No plans for insane hypergrowth, and in an industry where it’s very unlikely we’re going to be a billion-dollar company. If I felt myself getting pulled into high-touch sales for a SaaS product, I’d move on to the next thing. I’m not an idiot. I know it’s not profitable for you to have salespeople talking to people with a budget like mine. So don’t pretend that you will. The worst thing you can do is actually follow through and contact me, because it tells me that your business model is such that I’m going to get screwed in a couple years time, so I’m just as uninterested.

roamerz 4y ago

This. I evaluate lots of software in my position. If you don’t post at least ballpark pricing on your public webpage and you do not have a feature I cannot live without I’m talking to one of your competitors that does. Every time.

bookofjoe 4y ago
Concur. This is so obvious to me I do not understand why not posting a price — no matter what it is — is still considered good business practice. Perhaps once upon a time before the internet but no longer.
- blowski 4y ago
  It’s not that they have a fixed price they’re not sharing with you. They want to estimate how much you’ll pay first - look at Crunchbase, etc. I’m not saying it’s a good idea but there are plenty of smart cookies who seem to think it maximises revenue. If you want to counteract, have a shitty little startup with no funding and ask for the quote for them.
  - tshaddox 4y ago
    I suspect it’s primarily a mix of three things. The first is price discrimination, like you mention. The second is wanting to have some control over the sales process (price anchoring, tempering sticker stock, etc.). The third is related to the second: focusing inbound sales efforts by subtly communicating that “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it” for a large chunk of price-sensitive customers.
    - lukefischer 4y ago
      anytime you hear "custom quote" it means a sales person is try to maximize his or her value out of you
      - roamerz 4y ago

toss1 4y ago

>> will not click "contact a sales associate" and just leave when you won't say how much a thing costs. THIS!! Having run small businesses in several technology industries, I cannot emphasize how much this is true. I very well understand that pricing can be complex. But if you cannot give me even an order of magnitude as to whether your prices are even remotely feasible for me or my customer's project, I likely don't have the time or motivation to find out. Yes, I get it, you think your likelihood of sales is better if I talk to someone and they can pitch me on how wonderful your stuff is. Bullshirt. Maybe one in 500 times is that true. You are wasting my time and yours. And, no this is not a filter to weed out the small players. My small shops have done work for anything from individuals to the largest multinational corps and governments. If your product is a fit, I can get the budget. But putting in that kind of wall is just offputting. This is very much like how the real estate industry used to treat the address of a property as a state secret, as if nothing is ever a 'drive-by', the sale will be lost if they can't talk with the customer, blah, blah, blah. Then the dam finally broke, and now they all put addresses and maps, and guess what? They save themselves tons of time because the buyers self-qualify! They check out the places themselves, and only call when it already looks like a good fit. Sales and marketing types really can get stuck in naive wrong ideas for decades...

teamskyfi 4y ago

The pricing page on our website is just the start. If you visit the desktop or download the mobile app (https://www.skyfi.com/download-app https://www.skyfi.com/download-app), you will see that we have dynamic pricing in-app. As you change the size of your area of interest (AOI), the price immediately changes. We are 100% focused on the UX for the end-user and will work hard to keep the purchasing process seamless. User feedback like these conversations is helpful.

LegitShady 4y ago
I'm not going to download and install your app to discover pricing either. There's a fair chance you can't get me to install your app ever, and the more of your service is tied to it, the less likely I am to use your service at all.
- int_19h 4y ago
  Their website has similar functionality where you can highlight an area on the map and it immediately tells you how much the photo will cost, updating the price as you tweak options.
- whstl 4y ago
  Doesn't seem to need a download: https://app.skyfi.com/explore https://app.skyfi.com/explore
  - LegitShady 4y ago
    thats actually pretty good
bunabhucan 4y ago
Is there no way to get a preview of the resolution and "look" of the image being processed? The preview is low resolution but could you unhide a random 100mx100m section to show it? From the preview I wouldn't pay for what I could see. I work with GIS and there are lots of aerial photos with crisp resolution of details but the season or lighting that day or color processing makes it look like a "bad photo."

CPLX 4y ago

> I might be one of those long tail customers for SkyFi, my Dad's birthday is coming up and I think he'd love a print of a satellite photo of his cottage on the lake up north ...it needs to be better than Google Maps It's not, it's drastically worse than Google Maps, not even comparable. That was my use case as well, I bought images (at the highest offered resolution) of my house upstate and the place I got married, thinking they'd be nice little framed items, and they're completely unusable. Google maps is probably 10-50x sharper. It's a confusing product. I guess there's a use case of tracking a something like how many warehouses your competitor has built, or avalanches, or forest fires, or all sorts of time sensitive things, but I feel like they could do a way better job of actually explaining what they are actually selling.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
int_19h 4y ago
Google Maps uses aerial photos past a certain level of magnification, if it is available in a given area, even if it's still labelled as "satellite". If you compare areas where there are no such photos - e.g. large natural parks - the hi-res samples on their website don't look any worse to me than Google.
- kraseng 4y ago
  Absolutely! Google uses aerial for popular locations (large cities). We will get into aerial in the next few months. (I am affiliated with SkyFi - CTO)

jandrese 4y ago

This so much. If I'm evaluating half a dozen different possible options for a product I'm not going to strike up a relationship with every single salesperson just to get the damn BOM line. Especially if they can't even get you a price without generating a full up purchase order which takes 2-3 days for no good reason.

boojums 4y ago

> photo as present I looked into something similar. If the photo only needs to be somewhat recent I would recommend plane photography. My state does a yearly plane survey, so I used that. If you know anyone in geotech or environmental engineering, they can probably point you in the right direction.