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Show HN: We built PriceLevel to find out what companies pay for SaaS
Hey HN! Christine and Steven here. As a PM and engineer, we’ve both evaluated and purchased a lot of software. One of the biggest frustrations was figuring out how much it would cost us without having to go through the sales process. When we did have a quote, we had no idea if we were getting a good deal or ripped off.
We built a site where you can see what other companies are actually paying for SaaS and enterprise software. Buyers contribute prices via quotes, pricing proposals, and other documentation to ensure quality.
We unlocked Talkdesk for Show HN users so that you can use the product without needing to sign in or upgrade. Check it out at https://www.pricelevel.com/showhn https://www.pricelevel.com/showhn. Would love to hear any feedback, thank you!
- 0x6461188A 2y agoHow do you know people are entering pricing info honestly? How do I trust anonymous respondents?
- giovannibonetti 2y agoNot OP, but I suspect they wait until they have lots of quotes from different sources and then pick the median.
- rokhayakebe 2y agoYou can make sure people who sign up use their company email. If they are found to add wrong information you can block their account. You can also give companies an opportunity to reply to a post.
- swyx 2y agointeresting that this and Blind dont seem to use zero knowledge proofs when the need for provable knowledge w/ privacy would seem super useful
- hobofan 2y agoRelated to that, I know that the SINE foundation[0] has been investigating using zero knowledge proofs for benchmarking. I also looks like they recently released a tool concretely to allow for privacy preserving benchmarking[1]. (I haven't looked into the the contents of the repo itself to check whether they are actually using zero knowledge proofs). [0]: https://sine.foundation https://sine.foundation [1]: https://github.com/sine-fdn/sine-benchmark https://github.com/sine-fdn/sine-benchmark
- xlbuttplug2 2y ago> If they are found to add wrong information you can block their account. How would you prove that a submission is not truthful? You can check if it's an outlier but that's definitely not foolproof.
- komali2 2y agoIt looks like you can trade insights for an unlimited account, so I'm assuming they actually vet your claims, e.g. ask for identifying information on who you are and what your company is, and ask to see evidence e.g. invoices, contracts. I mean, that's how I'd do it if I was wanting to build a platform with trustworthy, essentially canonical pricing lists, and charging a couple hundred bucks a year for people to see that info.
- nprateem 2y agoProbably against document disclosure rules of any competent medium to large company.
- lettergram 2y agolol this is why everything is in an NDA upfront. For us, every customer has pretty unique, so even two feature sets that look the same might have wildly different support agreements.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- smcleod 2y agoThis is a great idea. Nice work!
- cluo21 2y agoThank you!
- esafak 2y agoI think you should fuzz the prices and other specifics like the number of seats a bit for privacy. For even more privacy you could show faceted aggregates with error bars instead of individual accounts once your samples are big enough.
- cluo21 2y agoThat's a fair point. Just to make sure I understand, when you say fuzz - do you mean round up or down so it's a nice whole number?
- esafak 2y agoI would show an interval that's within 5% or whatever, but use the same intervals for all accounts otherwise people will be able to deduce the original number by calculating the midpoint :)
- cluo21 2y ago:thumbs-up:
- bigiain 2y agoI'd round it to probably just 2 significant digits. I don't care if it's $91,132 or $90,725 or $91,412 - all of those are effectively the same as $91k (unless I'm the vendor trying to work out who's leaking my pricing). What I'm looking for as a potential new customer is to see if it's going toi cost me ~200k or ~90k or ~10k or ~3k.
- cluo21 2y agoThanks for this suggestion! We have implemented this change
- red-iron-pine 2y agoto the nearest thousand or hundred. 731 seats @ $77492.32 could be ~700-750 seats at ~$75k-$80k and that's still a useful guide for me. A lot of estimations are done with "t-shirt sizes", and just knowing a rough range with a rough margin of error makes things so much easier. I'll let my procurement team fight for the $3k or 31 user difference, and do the back and forth with quotes, but I can run w/ those broad numbers right now
- apimade 2y agoAdd region or locations immediately. Single biggest factor outside of customer size or how much product they’re buying. Also contract length. Pretty common to get deep discounts with multi year agreements.
- myrloc 2y agoUseful info. Might want to make the ordered quantity and contract length ranges though, re: fuzzing anything that might identify the client
- cluo21 2y agoMm, yea - that's a buyer attribute we can add to clarify. And definitely! We do have contract length, though that's locked away as a Pro feature
- cluo21 2y agoUpdate: we've added geography to buyer attributes and clarified the contract length
- Scorpiion 2y agoLooks like a nice service, it also sounds like something the SaaS companies who's pricing information you are showing would not like. I'm curious how you look at that? Are there any legal risks for end users to share this type of information via your site? I'm thinking if the SaaS providers have some legal statements about not sharing prices (similar to how certain database providers don't allow sharing of database benchmarks).
- cluo21 2y agoBuyer anonymity is mission critical for us and we've taken some steps to do that like generalizing company size and industry. There's been some great feedback in this thread (thanks everybody!) about additional fuzzing we can do to protect our buyers that we'll implement. While there may be some SaaS companies who don't like this level of transparency, we hope this actually leads to a faster sales cycle because buyers have pre-qualified themselves.
- lvspiff 2y ago> we hope this actually leads to a faster sales cycle because buyers have pre-qualified themselves. But by obfuscating their pricing they are able to create a marketing "lead" when you contact them that will one day evolve into a client and therefor its better for them to "pre-qualify" you. I personally hate this model as it drives me absolutely insane to spend a month of going back and forth with a vendor, going over what i'd like to do and why, investing time in understanding their stack and product, only to find out its 2x my budget or something like they wont even consider me since its less than 10k. If you hide your pricing, make me go through an extensive process, and I let you know im trying to implement a PoC or a small entry level and you come at me with $1k/month I'm likely going to walk away and be frustrated enough to not want to do business with you ever. You've created more of a negative experience that i will tell others about than a "lead". Yet this goes against every companies thinking (even my won) so it must work on someone.
- bigiain 2y ago> If you hide your pricing, make me go through an extensive process, and I let you know im trying to implement a PoC or a small entry level and you come at me with $1k/month I'm likely ... ... to see if I can replicate the important parts of your SaaS for my needs, then open source it or start a competitor with a sane and transparent pricing structure to capture the rest of the market like me.
- anotherhue 2y agoSee also: https://ssotax.org/ https://ssotax.org/
- xtracto 2y agoThis is also a great site! I remember there was a similar one but for "open source" (heavy quotes) self-hosted software. I find those sooo shady. I also remember there was some Nginx proxy or similar that enabled SSO in several of those applications.
- aleks5678 2y agoHow much does Vendr cost? Their own pricing is not transparent.
- anotherhue 2y agoI don't remember, I feel like it might have had some connection to the savings but it's been a while.
- eregenold1 2y agoHey Aleks! Vendr is a free product, though we do offer premium add-ons shared here: https://www.vendr.com/pricing https://www.vendr.com/pricing Happy to answer any other questions you have around price or Vendr in general. If you create a free account, we're also happy to provide a free Premium Onboarding session to help you understand everything about the product. Feel free to email me if you have any other Qs :) emily dot regenold @ vendr dot com
- aleks5678 2y agoThanks
- piterrro 2y agoWhat is the incentive to contribute and how do you check the legitimacy of the numbers provided?
- passwordoops 2y agoLove this! As a consumer, there's nothing like open pricing. However, as a provider I can totally see a situation where I (proverbially, I'm not in this business) sue you for disclosing what amounts to a trade secret (depending on what's in the fine print) and compel you to give up all documents so I can go after my loose-lipped client too. I hope you've got your legal bases covered
- uoaei 2y agoIs there precedent that points in either direction that pricing details are considered a trade secret (or whatever the legally enforceable version of that is)?
- passwordoops 2y agoI've signed and written quotes that have those provisions. What the legal standing is, I can't comment on because it never came to that. This is with the obvious caveat that public tenders are the exception, but only after it's awarded
- staticautomatic 2y agoSure. Broadly, a trade secret under state and federal law is "information that derives independent economic value from not being generally known to the public or people who can obtain economic value from it and is the subject of efforts to maintain its secrecy that are reasonable under the circumstances." Price lists could clearly fall under this definition, and they do! Here's an 8th circuit case where the plaintiff "adequately allege[d] that the information that was purportedly misappropriated— ... pricing information ... qualifies as trade secret[]." Ahern Rentals, 59 F.4th 948 (2023).
- tyingq 2y agoThere's precedent that points in both directions. There was a fair amount of research when there was a push for transparency in hospital pricing for services in the US. One piece of research: https://portal.ct.gov/-/media/OHS/Healthcare-Cabinet/2021-Meetings/March-9/Gudiksen_Secret-of-Health-Care-Prices_CHCF.pdf https://portal.ct.gov/-/media/OHS/Healthcare-Cabinet/2021-Me... You'll see there's some cited court cases that supported pricing as a trade secret, and some that held it was not. It seems to be still pretty muddy legally.
- a5seo 2y agoReally great job. Whether it’s legal for customers to share this info or not is really a gray area. If the data is only shared in an aggregate fashion, I doubt they can do much without a subpoena. And then what? Sue the website? Sorry, no. Section 230. John Doe suits against anonymous customers? Nothing requires PriceLevel to retain the PII of users… they can capture the data, validate, and flush the PII. “Sorry, we have no information about the contributor of this data.” My sense is this will be the primary innovation of this service— how to get this info and keep it useful to end users without very much ability to vet it. Worth the effort.
- bigiain 2y ago> John Doe suits against anonymous customers? How many TalkDesk customers do you suppose there are paying $91,132 for 62 users? I'd guess TalkDesk know exactly who that is. (I doubt that makes it any easier to prevail if they try to sue them, but I wouldn't want to be the customer negotiating next years contract wit them. "Hi, it's TalkDesk account management here. Just letting you know your contract expires at the end of next month. Here's a new contract for the following 12 months, with the special for you pricing of $425,762 for your 62 seats. Hope to hear from you soon, and have a nice day!"
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y agoSo simple but good. Now we need a similar thing that publishes database benchmarks in spite of DeWitt. Use a few standardized datasets and boom.
- a13n 2y agoAs a buyer, it's definitely nice to have more data on this. Pricing can be very opaque and sometimes I just want to know the ballpark to know if it's even worth exploring. Annoying to spend 30 minutes on a call to get that when you could have it in 2 seconds. As an operator, I know a lot of SaaS agreements include language saying the customer will protect the vendor's confidential data including information about pricing. I doubt it's legal in the majority of the time for buyers to share this data. And if the buyer is sharing confidential data with you, you're likely taking on risk by sharing it publicly, even in aggregate form. You could add something saying that the buyer agrees that they have the legal rights to share the information with you, to protect yourself. But at some point you should know that the majority of the time, even if that box is checked, they don't.
- amelius 2y agoThe buyer is already sharing that information with their bank, so the confidentiality is already broken :)
- toomuchtodo 2y agoBanks with business accounts is who this company should partner with. Sidesteps any contractual remedies a seller might attempt. Opt in of course for the customer.
- Quarrel 2y agoBanks don't know the terms of the contract, nor the customer specifics, usually. Sure, they get some good insight, but they don't know how many seats, what level of support, etc etc. They just see a transaction $X from company A -> company B.
- e12e 2y agoIsn't this like saying that if you fulfill your prescription at a pharmacy, your medical data is open?
- orliesaurus 2y agoThis is COOL! Finally some transparency honestly it was much needed
- techcofounder 2y agothis is cool! but how is it diff than vendr?
- ziziyO 2y agoSubmitting fake overpriced quotes for my competitor’s products
- e12e 2y agoAh, clever. Committing document fraud? > Buyers contribute prices via quotes, pricing proposals, and other documentation to ensure quality.
- hipadev23 2y ago> Committing document fraud Stop using words that makes it sounds like a crime. It’s a survey. Nobody is under any legal requirement to provide correct info.
- gruez 2y ago>It’s a survey. Nobody is under any legal requirement to provide correct info. A review is arguably just a "survey" as well, but if you provide incorrect info (ie. lie) you can be sued for defamation.
- cess11 2y agoCorporations can be defamed?
- gruez 2y agoWhy can't they?
- cess11 2y agoIt's a fictive person and not a real one?
- withinboredom 2y ago
- hdaz0017 2y agoI am not sure where the information was gained, but I believe this is only a fraction of the overall costs for an organisation. (probably limited number of account(s)).
- cdchn 2y agoThought this was a great idea until I saw you had to create an account to see details. Seems pretty antithetical to the entire premise.
- ed_mercer 2y agoWould you give valuable information away for free? Of course not.
- mistrial9 2y agoI think that the entire net economy has to make new social contracts about price discovery.. somewhere between Debian and Oracle.. for example.. and I support open data generally. But how is it antithetical to make a service for site customers with a login? given high-powered robots on the net and very unexpected guests as a fact-of-life on the network.. this seems more like locking your door at night in a mid-sized town, not some deep betrayal of cause or rank hypocrisy .. no?
- komali2 2y agoI think basically all non-PII data should be Free as in Freedom, but this is an interesting business problem. You can view it for free, if you submit 5 pricing datapoints of your own. If it was all free, I suppose they'd have to reduce whatever friction they have in authenticating data input (I'm assuming they ask to see invoices or contracts for now), and run the risk of competitors pricing eachother up or just bad data being entered.
- joshuaturner 2y agoGonna make a new site that just embeds a Google Sheet and lists all the pricing details - PriceLevelLevel.com
- datascienced 2y agoA json file in a Github is all you need
- RileyJames 2y agoGreat idea, great site. I signed up. But post-sign up on the modal explaining how it works I was unable to scroll below “Upgrade”, in order to reach the continue button. iPhone SE2. Keen to use this. Having just been through the dance to obtain Drata, I’d love to just know the price ahead of time. I know there was a YC company many years ago that “negotiated saas pricing as a service”. The pain is not just knowing the price, it’s also: - what features and versions of features are included in why I’m paying for?? - what is the value of the extra bs that’s being packaged in, and can I negotiate it away? Or how can I make use of it? I feels there’s a lot of value in a community of recent buyers of a product being able to communicate openly. Any company that takes actions against their own customers for trying to make the most of their product should be replaced.
- cluo21 2y agoOof, thank you for telling us about the modal and the iphone model - we're on it.
- j45 2y agoGreat idea, congrats on the launch - valuable to learn where pricing deals end. SaaS sales can be guilty of drive-by sales, where the implementation fails to reach promises. It puts a black eye too often on good products.
- guidedlight 2y agoGood idea. It needs to be clearly global though.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- nine_zeros 2y agoVery nice indeed. A suggestion - I cannot tell if the pricing is per contract/per month/per year etc. Would be great to be able to collect all this info and then slice and dice it.
- mikpanko 2y agoHow do you verify accuracy of contributions? What stops somebody from submitting fake (overpriced) numbers for companies they don’t like (competitors)?
- spxneo 2y agothis is what I want to know and somebody in the comments already said they are going to do exactly that.
- yieldcrv 2y agopricing for open pricing! now this is what I come to HN for
- xsc 2y agoadblockers block logo.clearbit.com
- tomrod 2y agoPrice per what unit? For example, checked out Hubspot, the price could be monthly but it's not clear to me.
- astrodust 2y agoI'd assume monthly but I'd rather not have to assume.
- deathanatos 2y agoAnd I'd've assumed $/yr. Otherwise … $1M/y for Slack? I figure that's probably too high … or someone is getting fleeced. But yeah, the number of times I've seen management spreadsheets doing math on "$" where "$" is a weakly-typed mix of $/mo & $/yr, and then the "result" used to "justify" decisions…
- cluo21 2y agoWe've normalized the prices to per year based on the feedback - thanks everybody
- moralestapia 2y agoThis is really nice and I like it a lot, disregarding of the "transparency" thing, I completely loathe when I have to "call to get a quote" for a SaaS. If you can quote a launch to orbit online [1], you can abso-fucking-lutely give me a concrete price for your relatively simple SPA when I'm browsing through it. A suggestion, the price is unclear, is it per month? per year? one time? per the events described? Make that clear. Congrats for shipping! 1: https://www.spacex.com/rideshare/ https://www.spacex.com/rideshare/
- tumidpandora 2y agoHow do you keep something like this up to date? Not like you could scrape it from somewhere…
- ramonverse 2y agoCool idea, hope it grows!
- nen-nomad 2y agoThis looks like a handy service for anyone evaluating enterprise software. Is there any normalization done on the pricing to account for things like contract duration, number of seats, feature tiers, etc? Or is it just the raw pricing data?
- cluo21 2y agoWe've gotten good feedback around the need to normalize total price shown by contract duration. As for other normalization, we breakout pricing into per seat cost, etc in the detailed pricing insights.
- kaiwenwang 2y agoReminds me of machowski's article on order books. By making these things public, I think it'll decrease the variance in costs in the space. If it was public knowledge how similar SaaS are priced, people would always go for the cheaper option (this assumes identical features, which is not the case). I guess in the end, pricing is determined by costs (materials, labor, rents) for a floor and then profits (which might as well be a random number). https://www.machow.ski/posts/2021-07-18-introduction-to-limit-order-books/ https://www.machow.ski/posts/2021-07-18-introduction-to-limi...
- mistrial9 2y agono - the brand has value for discovery and building new customer relationships, then details of sector, sales, contractual requirements, sector "norms" .. lots of details ..
- enahs-sf 2y agolevels.fyi for pricing. Love it.
- webprofusion 2y agoThis is cool, if we just have straight up pricing for a product (no custom pricing) can we just publish that so people can see it on the site? Specifically would like to list pricing https://certifytheweb.com/register https://certifytheweb.com/register (Certificate Management)
- nhggfu 2y ago[flagged]
- cjonas 2y agoAm I missing something is or Salesforce (the og SaaS) missing from your list?
- mtillman 2y agoI pay for hubspot quarterly and still have no idea how their contract works or how much I'm supposed to be paying without letting our contract audit DNN have a whack at it. Completely opaque order forms and value. I'm convinced we should just be using a google sheet like wework did until they went public.
- moomoo11 2y agoTotally. Spreadsheets are king.
- trojanalert 2y agoBloody life saver! So hard to find this, and all I want is a basic understanding. Thank you!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- neilv 2y agoLooks like you're leaking marketing data about your visitors to clearbit.com.
- sublimefire 2y agoThe advice I had related to pricing which captures the gist. If the website does not show prices and asks you to call then expect to pay at least a five figured sum.
- styren 2y agomonthly or annually?
- codegeek 2y agoAnnually to start with because most prices are quoted annually for mid to enterprise size deals.
- red-iron-pine 2y agoyes
- calderwoodra 2y agoYep, that's because it wouldn't be economical for the company to have a sales team and require a demo call if the contract is anything less.
- debarshri 2y agoThis is one of the most amazing products I have seen in long time in HN. This is simple but super valuable! One thing, I would recommend is to add some indicators that can help us trust the information or the data you are providing. It would go a long way then.
- jorge-d 2y agoLove your "About Us" page
- steve_taylor 2y agoDo you have an enterprise plan?
- cluo21 2y agoIf you'd like to find out the pricing for the enterprise plan, feel free to contact us! We'll put you through our sales funnel. /s We don't have a formal B2B plan right now, but we are working with some companies so we're happy to work together on something that makes sense. Feel free to contact me (in bio) if you'd like to chat
- xyzzy_plugh 2y agoThe problem with this approach is that often for any sort of "Enterprise" deal the contract varies wildly, not just in agreed pricing terms but in length and terms and conditions. For example I've inked contracts where there were additional terms covering availability and refunds, severability, liability, and so on. This isn't unusual, but it usually does impact the price to some extent. Additionally for large contracts there is often feature work or support in the form of bespoke software deliverables. It's one thing if you, the SaaS, know what your price is, and everyone is more or less paying the same, in which case this tool works. But otherwise without all the additional contract nits it's not going to paint a clear picture.
- red-iron-pine 2y agoaye. i've had one-off data center colo contracts with ramps up for space and power use. sales guy and I were basically making up numbers on the spot. currently dealing with similar approaches in the cloud space, though the (major) provider isn't as flexible with their ramp.
- abakker 2y agoPlease, get qualtrics datapoints. It's...crazy.
- nprateem 2y agoAt $500 per year for an account and posting here you're just asking for other people to do the same and undercut you
- michaelmior 2y agoCan I think of it as Glassdoor for SaaS?
- mrbluecoat 2y agoThat's exactly what I thought of. Hopefully that model can shield from any lawsuit attempts.
- candiodari 2y agoWhy isn't stuff like microsoft office included in here?
- bagels 2y agoLists price, but doesn't state the term (monthly, yearly, etc.)
- tylervigen 2y agoOne data point: I'd happily pay 20x your current pro price point if you are able to expand the suppliers covered and the n for each.
- cluo21 2y agoOut of curiosity, what would be your n for each supplier?
- ab_testing 2y agoAny entries for ERP or accounting software ?
- cluo21 2y agoNot yet, but was there a specific supplier you had in mind?