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I'm a CTO who makes purchasing decisions. There are numerous products I likely would have purchased, but I either find a substitute or just go without because

I'm a CTO who makes purchasing decisions. There are numerous products I likely would have purchased, but I either find a substitute or just go without because I won't play the stupid "let's get on a call" game. If your website doesn't give me enough information to: 1. Know enough about your product to know that it will (generally speaking) meet my needs/requirements. 2. Know that the pricing is within the ballpark of reasonable given what your product does. Then I will move on (unless I'm really desparate, which I assure you is rarely the case). I've rolled-my-own solution more than once as well when there were no other good competitors. That's not to say that calls never work or don't have a place, because they definitely do. The key to using the call successfully (with me at least) is to use the call to get into true details about my needs, after I know that you're at least in the ballpark. Additionally, the call should be done efficiently. We don't need a 15 minute introduction and overview about you. We don't need a bunch of small talk about weather or sports. 2 minutes of that is ok, or when waiting for additional people to join the call, but beyond that I have things to do. I know what my needs are. I understand you need some context on my company and needs in order to push useful information forward, and I also understand that many potential customers will not take the lead in asking questions and providing that context, but the sooner you take the temperature and adjust, the better. Also, you can get pretty far as a salesperson if you just spend 5 minutes looking at our website before the call! Then you don't have to ask basic questions about what we do. If you're willing to invest in the time to get on a call, then it's worth a few minutes of time before-hand to look at our website.

freedomben 2y ago
Oh I might add another huge thing: Have a way to justify/explain your pricing and how you came to that number. When you have to "learn about my company" in order to give me pricing info, I know you're just making the price up based on what you think I can pay. That's going to backfire on you because after you send me pricing, I'm going to ask you how you arrived at those numbers. Is it by vCPU? by vRAM? by number of instances? by number of API calls per month? by number of employees? by number of "seats"? If you don't have some objective way of determining the price you want to charge me, you're going to feel really stupid and embarrassed when I drill into the details.
- JoshTko 2y ago
  I'm confused by this, why would sales team know in detail the vRAM contribution to sales price, and how is it relevant to your purchase decision? I've never heard of enterprise/SAAS pricing to be based primarily using cost plus pricing.
  - adammarples 2y ago
    Isn't that exactly how a lot of things are priced? Ie. Snowflake. Pay for compute, pay for storage, etc.
    - malfist 2y ago
      Some things are sure. But not most. You wouldn't expect to go to McDonald's and they tell you (or even know) how much the fertilizer to grow the corn that feed the pigs that made the bacon contributed to the price you pay for a burger
      - atq2119 2y ago
        If McDonald's insisted on having a long sales phone call to sell me a burger, then yeah, I'd expect them to be able to provide me that information.
        gitgud 2y ago
        Really? That means you basically want to know what profit margins they’re running at… which no business would want to (or should need to) reveal
        squeaky-clean 2y ago
        That's exactly what's happening to you when you're the prospective buyer in one of those calls. I'm not in sales, but I've had a job once where I could see all the financials. And we would very often be charging one customer 10x what we charged another for exactly the same tier of service. Sometimes the huge corps would be paying more for a lower service tier than a small corp on a higher tier.
_nhh 2y ago
I wanted to hire a personal trainer who just couldnt coordinate a call with me and I asked him to send me the details per mail. They said they dont do emails so didnt choose them as it was to scammy for me
- moffkalast 2y ago
  They don't do emails? What are they, illiterate?
  - _nhh 2y ago
    i think so xD
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    Quite possibly.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
giancarlostoro 2y ago
Going to add the most important thing: It is perfectly fine to end calls early if it feels like it has phased itself out. Don't be afraid to do so! Everyone on the call is costing someone else a lot of income. This goes for internal or external calls.
- freedomben 2y ago
  Yes, seriously. When a sales call is scheduled 30 minutes but 5 minutes in we have a conclusion, you get a lot of good will points from me if you thank me for my time, ask me if there's any other questions I have, and then conclude the call. You can even make this explicit with a quip like, "I'll give everybody 20 minutes back!" then it's clear you are being courteous with our time.
  - giancarlostoro 2y ago
    Some people dont know when to end calls early and everyone else is too polite to tell them to end it. I had a manager who made it a point to suggest to end a call early. I try not to force calls to end early unless I know everyone on the call. I notice when its all devs its really easy to suggest ending early vs when non devs are on a call unless a dev manager does it.
nu11ptr 2y ago
For #2, someone once said there are two pricing models (was it Joel Spolsky? Don't recall..): $0 - $999 - direct sale/download, pricing on website $50,000+ - full sales team, no pricing on website And essentially not much in between... this has perhaps changed a bit with SaaS, but this is still semi true.
- egorfine 2y ago
  Oh yes it was Joel Spolsky: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/11/18/price-as-signal/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/11/18/price-as-signal/
  - ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
    That's like a restaurant, with no prices on the menu. "If you have to ask..." I would definitely like to never have to talk to another "people person," and no-calls-but-we'll-give-you-the-info-you-need policy sounds great.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      You mean a restaurant that gets away with serving mediocre food for ridiculous prices, because the "no prices on the menu" gimmick generates enough status/prestige to compensate for any customer dissatisfaction? I.e. the restaurant equivalent of being famous for being famous.
      - ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
        Wouldn't know. I generally avoid those joints. My tastes are a lot more plebeian. Unfortunately, I have to eat in one, every now and then, but I always walk away disappointed.
  - crottypeter 2y ago
    I think you mean this link: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-duckies/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...
epolanski 2y ago
I'm a freelancer and sometimes I have to recommend software or services for my clients. When I evaluate choices I automatically remove all of those that don't have pricing up front as I have no time nor intention to do this. I don't think any company lost millions on me, but many lost tens of thousands. API providers are the worst, but I kinda understand them.
sz4kerto 2y ago
Are you me? I'm a CTO too, and I feel _exactly_ like this.
thrawa8387336 2y ago
TLDR; please don't call him, he really doesn't like calls. Must be a gen z
throwaway98797 2y ago
your probably leaving money on the table then i’d find that unacceptable as a ceo you got to do the work to do what’s best for the company, not yourself
- mlyle 2y ago
  But part of doing what's right is considering opportunity cost. If buying something would be a win for an org takes up too much organizational bandwidth because of how hard it is to procure, then it's not worth fiddling about trying to buy it. The org gains a whole bunch of time he's not wasting on useless calls.
  - throwaway98797 2y ago
    when your purchasing 100k+ products having a conversation makes a lot of sense lots of opportunities to find easy win-win finding out what the salesmen incentives are and working with them can lead to a good outcome obviously not worth it for smaller ticket stuff
    - mlyle 2y ago
      There's a bazillion things we could be thinking about buying. Being able to serve yourself and figure out if there's any fit removes friction. Spending an hour on an initial sales call to find out that information isn't optimal. As he's said, when he's desperate, he will do more work. And he is willing to do calls when it makes sense, but expects them to be efficient and expects to be able to qualify the vendor.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  No, they're protecting money on their company's table from being taken by random sellers. "Let's get on a call" game seldom leads to better deals for the buyer.
  - Moru 2y ago
    I see it like this. If the seller can have salespeople waiting on a call, there can be better deals somewhere else. If the seller can have people cold-calling other companies, there most certainly is a better deal around that they don't want me to know about. Over the years I have developed a salescall aversion to the grade that I hang up as soon as I my unconciousness have detected one. It has gone so far that I have had to apologize to our salespeople calling me and I just hang up by reflex. Very awkward I tell you.
bdavbdav 2y ago
I’d extend that to sales calls where they try to get you to bend your requirements to fit the mis-aligned product.
HideousKojima 2y ago
>2. Know that the pricing is within the ballpark of reasonable given what your product does. My goto line is "I can get a ballpark estimate for chucking 22 metric tons into low earth orbit, why can't I get a ballpark estimate for your boring enterprise software library licensing?" Links to SpaceX pricing help here.
dimatura 2y ago
Agreed. As someone in a place to make purchasing decisions, if I can just sign up and try something without having to "jump on a call" and sit through a demo, I'm more likely to do so. I'm more willing to meet afterwards if I like what I see. As it happens, a while back I did exactly this for a company after reading a post about their launch on HN. In a later conversation with their CEO, I found out we were their first customer!
- eastbound 2y ago
  You can go to the SpaceX website and see the price of rockets. You can literally enter your credit card numbers to pay for it.
  - mushufasa 2y ago
    you mean... the gift shop with the model rockets?
    - WJW 2y ago
      No, go to https://rideshare.spacex.com/search?orbitClassification=2&launchDate=2025-05-17&payloadMass=15 https://rideshare.spacex.com/search?orbitClassification=2&la... and click through a couple of times. It literally asks you for your contact data and credit card number so you can pay 650k USD for launching 15 kg to LEO.
      - wat10000 2y ago
        Technically you’re just paying the $5,000 deposit with your card. They probably don’t want to eat the card processing fees on the full amount and will request some other sort of transfer for the remainder.
  - dimatura 2y ago
    I'd wait to see if they have a good black friday sale.
ccppurcell 2y ago
Also, this is very minor but phrases like "get on a call" or worse, references to jumping or hopping, really irritate me. What's wrong with that good old English verb "to have"? Or better yet, call is (believe it or not) a verb! Can I call you? Maybe. Can we hop on a quick call? Absolutely not.
griomnib 2y ago
This sort of cuts both ways, I’m on the small business selling side. Sometimes somebody will want a call, I’ll do my dance, tell them the price, then they try to nickel and dime to get a lower price - which isn’t on offer. That blows a lot of my time. On the other hand, the software I sell solves some novel problems at scale and is designed to be extensible - so in cases where somebody wants to build on the foundation I’ve built I really do need a call to figure out if there’s a missing feature or similar I’d need to build out, or if there’s some implementation detail that’s highly specialized to a given situation. By and large my evolving strategy is to not have a fixed price listed online, and to reply to emails promptly with pricing with offer to have a call for complex situations.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  As someone else posted, SpaceX lists their prices to launch things into space. Your software situations are more complex?
  - jaredklewis 2y ago
    That doesn’t seem like a logical inference to me. A house construction contractor doesn't have a price list for the sake of obscuring prices, nor because house construction is more complex than space flight. It's because houses are custom and thus prices are too variable to list in any meaningful way. For a SaaS product with significant custom integration work, it seems reasonable that prices might also vary in the same way.
    - kijin 2y ago
      A small-scale contractor doesn't have a price list, but a real estate developer who builds an entire subdivision at a time definitely has a price list. There might be taxes and fees on top of that, but everyone expects that anyway. At least the base product should have a clear price tag. If I can tell in advance whether your SaaS product costs $10/seat/mo or $100/seat/mo, I'll probably feel more comfortable asking whether the custom integration work will cost $50k or $100k.
  - 2y ago
psyclobe 2y ago
Case in point this dumpster fire of a product: aparavi.com
randerson 2y ago
My least favorite is when I relent and get on their call, and after 30 minutes of answering their questions, they say "OK, next step is we'll schedule another call with our product specialist, because i'm just a sales guy and i didn't really understand most of that."
- sjburt 2y ago
  The worst part is that the sales person has to go back and pitch their team on whether it’s worth their time to get back to you.
shin_lao 2y ago
What's the most expensive software you bought?
- zoogeny 2y ago
  lol, believe it or not this was an interview question one of my Director of Engineering used to use to sus out the experience of people. As I read the parent comment I was thinking the same thing. Be careful listening to this kind of advice. You never know what ballpark the "CTO" is playing in.
  - shin_lao 2y ago
    I'm just thinking about 6 to 7 figures software investment and trying to understand how you could do that without several meetings.
    - driverdan 2y ago
      Easy, use JIRA and give your whole company seats. Add on some other Atlassian products and you'll quickly get to 4-5 figures per month.
joemclarke 2y ago
I’m a CTO as well and never get on these types of calls to get more details and pricing since they can be such a big waste of time. Someone else from our organization will get on the call instead and then give me the pricing details so we can make a decision.
chefandy 2y ago
I’ve had too many bad sales experiences to deal with that. The second someone tries to force me into a sales call for a non-customized or self-configurable service or product, I assume they’re just shamelessly setting me up to extract as much money from me as they possibly can. I just can’t assume good faith on the part of a company that only distributes product information through someone making a commission. It feels like they’re inviting me into a mouse trap.
vishnugupta 2y ago
To add to those two, I need a working demo (in sandbox of course) of the product without which there's no way for me to validate to what extent your product meets my requirements. It doesn't matter how many screenshots, product explainers, videos you might have put up. Nothing comes close to a sandbox. Trial period is also fine.
b3lvedere 2y ago
At the beginning of this year i had some reflection on projects at two clients. While the businesses of both clients is vastly different, they were kinda using the same setup: One business critical system. The rest was mostly standard stuff and both companies are about the same size. Client 1 contacted us by phone they needed to upgrade their IT. The appointed account manager and project leader had no clue of the clients business. The approval of the project took about two months. Engineering was involed after the approval. The project took more than a year, mostly because of communication chaos on both sides. Everybody was annoyed. Client 2 contacted us by email they needed to upgrade their IT. The appointed account manager emailed engineering. After some emailing back and forth for a couple of days, both parties agreed on the project details. The approval of the project took about fifteen minutes. The project took about a month. We got cake.
- cutemonster 2y ago
  It's simpler to forward an email to the relevant people and agree on goals, than to forward a phone call :-)
BrandoElFollito 2y ago
When my team organizes calls or onsite mtgs with vendors, they always tell them to remove the first 10 slides because we are not interested in why security matters, how it changed over the last 20 years and how great the company is. They repeat this a few times so that it is clear. Least week I had a meeting which started with the above, I asked if they knew what we asked, they said yes but they this is very important. So I stayed, and when the ended the 15 slides with the hi
- cutemonster 2y ago
  The last sentence got garbled?
- BrandoElFollito 2y ago
  (sorry, somehow the end vanished) Do when they ended the 15 slides with their history I left the room. I find out really annoying when a vendor knows better what we need to hear. But not all are like this, some start by saying that the first 10 slides were removed :)
ArnoVW 2y ago
When evaluating and making purchasing decisions for my security department, I have the same dislike of this approach. And generally for me it is a red flag. Not (just) because of price gauging, but also because generally it is indicative of a very young company. In many cases they do not want to give the price because they don't know the price; they're still finding out how much they can charge.
brightball 2y ago
“Get on a call” is code for “we have commissioned sales people and in order to make that work we can’t let inbound leads from our website bypass them”
mooreds 2y ago
We sell a devtool (FusionAuth, an authentication server). We have clearish pricing on our website (the options are a bit confusing because you can self-host or pay for hosting), but we do have our enterprise pricing available for someone, and you can buy it with a credit card. In my four years there, we've had exactly one purchase of enterprise via the website. But every enterprise deal that I'm aware of has researched pricing, including using our pricing calculator. Then they want to talk to understand their particular use case, nuances of implementation and/or possible discounts. Maybe FusionAuth and its ilk are a different level of implementation difficulty than keygen? Maybe our docs aren't as good as they should be (the answer to this is yes, we can definitely improve them)? Maybe keygen will shift as they grow? (I noticed there was mention towards the bottom of the article about a short discovery call.) All that to say: * email/async communication is great * meet your customers where they are * docs are great and clear messaging pays off * devtools at a certain price point ($50/month vs $3k/month) deserve different go to market motions
- numbsafari 2y ago
  At least you offer a pricing calculator. When we are doing vendor research, we often dequeue or deprioritize vendors that do not have any kind of pricing available for the tier we require. Generally speaking, we assume things like volume discounts are available. Also, it's good to get a rough idea of what the delta between "Pro" and "Enterprise" happens to be. Not infrequently the reason that delta isn't available is because it's stupid orders of magnitude different. If we know that up front, we know not to waste our time tire kicking with a demo account. So, the middle ground you describes would seem, to me, to be the right place to be. Giving your pricing page a cursory glance, I would rank it pretty highly for the kind of "initial investigation" we might do. I think from an entrepreneur standpoint, if I see a space with vendors with non-transparent pricing, I often think "there's an opportunity there".
  - mooreds 2y ago
    > I think from an entrepreneur standpoint, if I see a space with vendors with non-transparent pricing, I often think "there's an opportunity there". That makes a ton of sense. IMO, it means one of two things: * prices are so high because of the cost of goods sold or margins that they'll scare off anyone researching and therefore there might be an 80% solution that can be priced transparently and eat the market * the company is still exploring pricing and doesn't have a firm grasp on COGS; this means there is some kind of blue ocean opportunity
ralusek 2y ago
I'm also a CTO frequently making product decisions, and I refer to it as "Boomer pricing." You want to get on a call with me to assess the size of my company and whether or not I have some bureaucratic, unconcerned entity with an indiscriminate pocketbook. Clear pricing up front, and ideally a pricing calculator, or I don't even consider it. If I make a product, I don't want you to use it because you found me first and I happened to harangue you on a sales call. I want you to find my product, compare it will full transparency to the other products, and go with mine if it best suits you. Anybody who behaves differently I immediately assume to be behaving in bad faith and is not actually confident in their product on its own merits.
- ezekg 2y ago
  > I want you to find my product, compare it will full transparency to the other products, and go with mine if it best suits you. Anybody who behaves differently I immediately assume to be behaving in bad faith and is not actually confident in their product on its own merits. Totally agree. I think this why I hated the enterprise sales dance so much -- if somebody doesn't want to buy, I don't want to sell; if they don't know what they're buying, they probably aren't the type of customer I'm looking for i.e. likely to become a support burden.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
that_guy_iain 2y ago
> There are numerous products I likely would have purchased, but I either find a substitute or just go without because I won't play the stupid "let's get on a call" game. > I've rolled-my-own solution more than once as well when there were no other good competitors. I don't want to be rude but this sounds like terrible business decisions. I would say this is a case of cutting your nose off to spite your face but I suspect it's not your money your wasting rolling-your-own solution. Like it normally costs a lot more in dev resources to build instead of buying. And it seems like your doing it because of your ego and your unwillingness to play stupid games.
- freedomben 2y ago
  That's a significant over-simplification and ends up wrong in many cases. Build vs. buy is largely the same equation as rent vs. own in real estate or automobiles. Generally speaking, in the short term renting is almost always cheaper, but there's a break-even point at which buying (aka building) becomes cheaper. Owning the system also grants considerable ability to build it to be exactly what you need, instead of hacking around deficiencies and/or begging your account manager to get your feature approved and implemented. There are plenty of situations in which the terrible business decision is to rent instead of build. The difficulty is that without knowing the future it's not always clear, so you have to use your best judgment and hope you get it right. Edit: Also don't forget that roll-your-own doesn't necessarily mean starting something from scratch. In many cases I opted to use and self-host an open source project that sometimes is sufficient all on its own, and when not we can make changes to it. I almost never start a non-trivial project from scratch just to avoid buying, unless it's a major piece of our product or value proposition in which case you have to consider the risk of building on a foundation you don't control.
  - that_guy_iain 2y ago
    > Build vs. buy is largely the same equation as rent vs. own in real estate or automobiles. I would say this is not a valid analogy. If you buy real estate you have an asset. However, if you build something that is not your core product you have a liability and not an asset. You're not going to get more money because you have a bunch of tech you built that you could have bought.
burnte 2y ago
I'm 100% agreement, right down to the CTO/CIO role. I just don't do business with them, period. I have a strict rule not to do business with people how cold call/cold email, hide info, and force pointless meetings. Once salesmen realize that I'm actually a very low maintenance customer who just knows what they want, they love me, I'm free commission to them because they never have to expend energy on me.
alon_11 2y ago
That’s so true, I have seen a company that offer a chat over Slack, so basically did the entire qualification you mentioned over the chat and gave me some high level data I needed before a full demo call. 2 minutes, no sales fluff. That’s was a nice touch.
TZubiri 2y ago
Not being upfront about prices is a major red flag, I associate it with someone selling pyramid schemes, or snake oil. If I ask price and you insist on showing me a presentation to get me hooked and invested, I'm out. At that point you are bound to be talking to a salesman whose job it is to sell and you are experiencing a process that was designed and perfected to manipulate you into buying. I don't want to buy from salesmen usually, directly from the manufacturer or provider is better, cut the middleman out. OTOH I have to be open to some imperfections, if we have to wait for someone or be inexperienced with sales process (introduction too long), that's fine. On some industries it's possible for someone to do the work without saying price even. An electrician might be happy to do the work without talking about price, and then you have almost no recourse when it's a shitload.

freedomben 2y ago

Oh I might add another huge thing: Have a way to justify/explain your pricing and how you came to that number. When you have to "learn about my company" in order to give me pricing info, I know you're just making the price up based on what you think I can pay. That's going to backfire on you because after you send me pricing, I'm going to ask you how you arrived at those numbers. Is it by vCPU? by vRAM? by number of instances? by number of API calls per month? by number of employees? by number of "seats"? If you don't have some objective way of determining the price you want to charge me, you're going to feel really stupid and embarrassed when I drill into the details.

JoshTko 2y ago
I'm confused by this, why would sales team know in detail the vRAM contribution to sales price, and how is it relevant to your purchase decision? I've never heard of enterprise/SAAS pricing to be based primarily using cost plus pricing.
- adammarples 2y ago
  Isn't that exactly how a lot of things are priced? Ie. Snowflake. Pay for compute, pay for storage, etc.
  - malfist 2y ago
    Some things are sure. But not most. You wouldn't expect to go to McDonald's and they tell you (or even know) how much the fertilizer to grow the corn that feed the pigs that made the bacon contributed to the price you pay for a burger
    - atq2119 2y ago
      If McDonald's insisted on having a long sales phone call to sell me a burger, then yeah, I'd expect them to be able to provide me that information.
      - gitgud 2y ago
        Really? That means you basically want to know what profit margins they’re running at… which no business would want to (or should need to) reveal
        squeaky-clean 2y ago
        That's exactly what's happening to you when you're the prospective buyer in one of those calls. I'm not in sales, but I've had a job once where I could see all the financials. And we would very often be charging one customer 10x what we charged another for exactly the same tier of service. Sometimes the huge corps would be paying more for a lower service tier than a small corp on a higher tier.

_nhh 2y ago

I wanted to hire a personal trainer who just couldnt coordinate a call with me and I asked him to send me the details per mail. They said they dont do emails so didnt choose them as it was to scammy for me

moffkalast 2y ago
They don't do emails? What are they, illiterate?
- _nhh 2y ago
  i think so xD
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  Quite possibly.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

giancarlostoro 2y ago

Going to add the most important thing: It is perfectly fine to end calls early if it feels like it has phased itself out. Don't be afraid to do so! Everyone on the call is costing someone else a lot of income. This goes for internal or external calls.

freedomben 2y ago
Yes, seriously. When a sales call is scheduled 30 minutes but 5 minutes in we have a conclusion, you get a lot of good will points from me if you thank me for my time, ask me if there's any other questions I have, and then conclude the call. You can even make this explicit with a quip like, "I'll give everybody 20 minutes back!" then it's clear you are being courteous with our time.
- giancarlostoro 2y ago
  Some people dont know when to end calls early and everyone else is too polite to tell them to end it. I had a manager who made it a point to suggest to end a call early. I try not to force calls to end early unless I know everyone on the call. I notice when its all devs its really easy to suggest ending early vs when non devs are on a call unless a dev manager does it.

nu11ptr 2y ago

For #2, someone once said there are two pricing models (was it Joel Spolsky? Don't recall..): $0 - $999 - direct sale/download, pricing on website $50,000+ - full sales team, no pricing on website And essentially not much in between... this has perhaps changed a bit with SaaS, but this is still semi true.

egorfine 2y ago
Oh yes it was Joel Spolsky: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/11/18/price-as-signal/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/11/18/price-as-signal/
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
  That's like a restaurant, with no prices on the menu. "If you have to ask..." I would definitely like to never have to talk to another "people person," and no-calls-but-we'll-give-you-the-info-you-need policy sounds great.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    You mean a restaurant that gets away with serving mediocre food for ridiculous prices, because the "no prices on the menu" gimmick generates enough status/prestige to compensate for any customer dissatisfaction? I.e. the restaurant equivalent of being famous for being famous.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
      Wouldn't know. I generally avoid those joints. My tastes are a lot more plebeian. Unfortunately, I have to eat in one, every now and then, but I always walk away disappointed.
- crottypeter 2y ago
  I think you mean this link: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-duckies/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...

epolanski 2y ago

I'm a freelancer and sometimes I have to recommend software or services for my clients. When I evaluate choices I automatically remove all of those that don't have pricing up front as I have no time nor intention to do this. I don't think any company lost millions on me, but many lost tens of thousands. API providers are the worst, but I kinda understand them.

sz4kerto 2y ago

Are you me? I'm a CTO too, and I feel _exactly_ like this.

thrawa8387336 2y ago

TLDR; please don't call him, he really doesn't like calls. Must be a gen z

throwaway98797 2y ago

your probably leaving money on the table then i’d find that unacceptable as a ceo you got to do the work to do what’s best for the company, not yourself

mlyle 2y ago
But part of doing what's right is considering opportunity cost. If buying something would be a win for an org takes up too much organizational bandwidth because of how hard it is to procure, then it's not worth fiddling about trying to buy it. The org gains a whole bunch of time he's not wasting on useless calls.
- throwaway98797 2y ago
  when your purchasing 100k+ products having a conversation makes a lot of sense lots of opportunities to find easy win-win finding out what the salesmen incentives are and working with them can lead to a good outcome obviously not worth it for smaller ticket stuff
  - mlyle 2y ago
    There's a bazillion things we could be thinking about buying. Being able to serve yourself and figure out if there's any fit removes friction. Spending an hour on an initial sales call to find out that information isn't optimal. As he's said, when he's desperate, he will do more work. And he is willing to do calls when it makes sense, but expects them to be efficient and expects to be able to qualify the vendor.
TeMPOraL 2y ago
No, they're protecting money on their company's table from being taken by random sellers. "Let's get on a call" game seldom leads to better deals for the buyer.
- Moru 2y ago
  I see it like this. If the seller can have salespeople waiting on a call, there can be better deals somewhere else. If the seller can have people cold-calling other companies, there most certainly is a better deal around that they don't want me to know about. Over the years I have developed a salescall aversion to the grade that I hang up as soon as I my unconciousness have detected one. It has gone so far that I have had to apologize to our salespeople calling me and I just hang up by reflex. Very awkward I tell you.

bdavbdav 2y ago

I’d extend that to sales calls where they try to get you to bend your requirements to fit the mis-aligned product.

HideousKojima 2y ago

>2. Know that the pricing is within the ballpark of reasonable given what your product does. My goto line is "I can get a ballpark estimate for chucking 22 metric tons into low earth orbit, why can't I get a ballpark estimate for your boring enterprise software library licensing?" Links to SpaceX pricing help here.

dimatura 2y ago

Agreed. As someone in a place to make purchasing decisions, if I can just sign up and try something without having to "jump on a call" and sit through a demo, I'm more likely to do so. I'm more willing to meet afterwards if I like what I see. As it happens, a while back I did exactly this for a company after reading a post about their launch on HN. In a later conversation with their CEO, I found out we were their first customer!

eastbound 2y ago
You can go to the SpaceX website and see the price of rockets. You can literally enter your credit card numbers to pay for it.
- mushufasa 2y ago
  you mean... the gift shop with the model rockets?
  - WJW 2y ago
    No, go to https://rideshare.spacex.com/search?orbitClassification=2&launchDate=2025-05-17&payloadMass=15 https://rideshare.spacex.com/search?orbitClassification=2&la... and click through a couple of times. It literally asks you for your contact data and credit card number so you can pay 650k USD for launching 15 kg to LEO.
    - wat10000 2y ago
      Technically you’re just paying the $5,000 deposit with your card. They probably don’t want to eat the card processing fees on the full amount and will request some other sort of transfer for the remainder.
- dimatura 2y ago
  I'd wait to see if they have a good black friday sale.

ccppurcell 2y ago

Also, this is very minor but phrases like "get on a call" or worse, references to jumping or hopping, really irritate me. What's wrong with that good old English verb "to have"? Or better yet, call is (believe it or not) a verb! Can I call you? Maybe. Can we hop on a quick call? Absolutely not.

griomnib 2y ago

This sort of cuts both ways, I’m on the small business selling side. Sometimes somebody will want a call, I’ll do my dance, tell them the price, then they try to nickel and dime to get a lower price - which isn’t on offer. That blows a lot of my time. On the other hand, the software I sell solves some novel problems at scale and is designed to be extensible - so in cases where somebody wants to build on the foundation I’ve built I really do need a call to figure out if there’s a missing feature or similar I’d need to build out, or if there’s some implementation detail that’s highly specialized to a given situation. By and large my evolving strategy is to not have a fixed price listed online, and to reply to emails promptly with pricing with offer to have a call for complex situations.

ryandrake 2y ago
As someone else posted, SpaceX lists their prices to launch things into space. Your software situations are more complex?
- jaredklewis 2y ago
  That doesn’t seem like a logical inference to me. A house construction contractor doesn't have a price list for the sake of obscuring prices, nor because house construction is more complex than space flight. It's because houses are custom and thus prices are too variable to list in any meaningful way. For a SaaS product with significant custom integration work, it seems reasonable that prices might also vary in the same way.
  - kijin 2y ago
    A small-scale contractor doesn't have a price list, but a real estate developer who builds an entire subdivision at a time definitely has a price list. There might be taxes and fees on top of that, but everyone expects that anyway. At least the base product should have a clear price tag. If I can tell in advance whether your SaaS product costs $10/seat/mo or $100/seat/mo, I'll probably feel more comfortable asking whether the custom integration work will cost $50k or $100k.
- 2y ago

psyclobe 2y ago

Case in point this dumpster fire of a product: aparavi.com

randerson 2y ago

My least favorite is when I relent and get on their call, and after 30 minutes of answering their questions, they say "OK, next step is we'll schedule another call with our product specialist, because i'm just a sales guy and i didn't really understand most of that."

sjburt 2y ago
The worst part is that the sales person has to go back and pitch their team on whether it’s worth their time to get back to you.

shin_lao 2y ago

What's the most expensive software you bought?

zoogeny 2y ago
lol, believe it or not this was an interview question one of my Director of Engineering used to use to sus out the experience of people. As I read the parent comment I was thinking the same thing. Be careful listening to this kind of advice. You never know what ballpark the "CTO" is playing in.
- shin_lao 2y ago
  I'm just thinking about 6 to 7 figures software investment and trying to understand how you could do that without several meetings.
  - driverdan 2y ago
    Easy, use JIRA and give your whole company seats. Add on some other Atlassian products and you'll quickly get to 4-5 figures per month.

joemclarke 2y ago

I’m a CTO as well and never get on these types of calls to get more details and pricing since they can be such a big waste of time. Someone else from our organization will get on the call instead and then give me the pricing details so we can make a decision.

chefandy 2y ago

I’ve had too many bad sales experiences to deal with that. The second someone tries to force me into a sales call for a non-customized or self-configurable service or product, I assume they’re just shamelessly setting me up to extract as much money from me as they possibly can. I just can’t assume good faith on the part of a company that only distributes product information through someone making a commission. It feels like they’re inviting me into a mouse trap.

vishnugupta 2y ago

To add to those two, I need a working demo (in sandbox of course) of the product without which there's no way for me to validate to what extent your product meets my requirements. It doesn't matter how many screenshots, product explainers, videos you might have put up. Nothing comes close to a sandbox. Trial period is also fine.

b3lvedere 2y ago

At the beginning of this year i had some reflection on projects at two clients. While the businesses of both clients is vastly different, they were kinda using the same setup: One business critical system. The rest was mostly standard stuff and both companies are about the same size. Client 1 contacted us by phone they needed to upgrade their IT. The appointed account manager and project leader had no clue of the clients business. The approval of the project took about two months. Engineering was involed after the approval. The project took more than a year, mostly because of communication chaos on both sides. Everybody was annoyed. Client 2 contacted us by email they needed to upgrade their IT. The appointed account manager emailed engineering. After some emailing back and forth for a couple of days, both parties agreed on the project details. The approval of the project took about fifteen minutes. The project took about a month. We got cake.

cutemonster 2y ago
It's simpler to forward an email to the relevant people and agree on goals, than to forward a phone call :-)

BrandoElFollito 2y ago

When my team organizes calls or onsite mtgs with vendors, they always tell them to remove the first 10 slides because we are not interested in why security matters, how it changed over the last 20 years and how great the company is. They repeat this a few times so that it is clear. Least week I had a meeting which started with the above, I asked if they knew what we asked, they said yes but they this is very important. So I stayed, and when the ended the 15 slides with the hi

cutemonster 2y ago
The last sentence got garbled?
BrandoElFollito 2y ago
(sorry, somehow the end vanished) Do when they ended the 15 slides with their history I left the room. I find out really annoying when a vendor knows better what we need to hear. But not all are like this, some start by saying that the first 10 slides were removed :)

ArnoVW 2y ago

When evaluating and making purchasing decisions for my security department, I have the same dislike of this approach. And generally for me it is a red flag. Not (just) because of price gauging, but also because generally it is indicative of a very young company. In many cases they do not want to give the price because they don't know the price; they're still finding out how much they can charge.

brightball 2y ago

“Get on a call” is code for “we have commissioned sales people and in order to make that work we can’t let inbound leads from our website bypass them”

mooreds 2y ago

We sell a devtool (FusionAuth, an authentication server). We have clearish pricing on our website (the options are a bit confusing because you can self-host or pay for hosting), but we do have our enterprise pricing available for someone, and you can buy it with a credit card. In my four years there, we've had exactly one purchase of enterprise via the website. But every enterprise deal that I'm aware of has researched pricing, including using our pricing calculator. Then they want to talk to understand their particular use case, nuances of implementation and/or possible discounts. Maybe FusionAuth and its ilk are a different level of implementation difficulty than keygen? Maybe our docs aren't as good as they should be (the answer to this is yes, we can definitely improve them)? Maybe keygen will shift as they grow? (I noticed there was mention towards the bottom of the article about a short discovery call.) All that to say: * email/async communication is great * meet your customers where they are * docs are great and clear messaging pays off * devtools at a certain price point ($50/month vs $3k/month) deserve different go to market motions

numbsafari 2y ago
At least you offer a pricing calculator. When we are doing vendor research, we often dequeue or deprioritize vendors that do not have any kind of pricing available for the tier we require. Generally speaking, we assume things like volume discounts are available. Also, it's good to get a rough idea of what the delta between "Pro" and "Enterprise" happens to be. Not infrequently the reason that delta isn't available is because it's stupid orders of magnitude different. If we know that up front, we know not to waste our time tire kicking with a demo account. So, the middle ground you describes would seem, to me, to be the right place to be. Giving your pricing page a cursory glance, I would rank it pretty highly for the kind of "initial investigation" we might do. I think from an entrepreneur standpoint, if I see a space with vendors with non-transparent pricing, I often think "there's an opportunity there".
- mooreds 2y ago
  > I think from an entrepreneur standpoint, if I see a space with vendors with non-transparent pricing, I often think "there's an opportunity there". That makes a ton of sense. IMO, it means one of two things: * prices are so high because of the cost of goods sold or margins that they'll scare off anyone researching and therefore there might be an 80% solution that can be priced transparently and eat the market * the company is still exploring pricing and doesn't have a firm grasp on COGS; this means there is some kind of blue ocean opportunity

ralusek 2y ago

I'm also a CTO frequently making product decisions, and I refer to it as "Boomer pricing." You want to get on a call with me to assess the size of my company and whether or not I have some bureaucratic, unconcerned entity with an indiscriminate pocketbook. Clear pricing up front, and ideally a pricing calculator, or I don't even consider it. If I make a product, I don't want you to use it because you found me first and I happened to harangue you on a sales call. I want you to find my product, compare it will full transparency to the other products, and go with mine if it best suits you. Anybody who behaves differently I immediately assume to be behaving in bad faith and is not actually confident in their product on its own merits.

ezekg 2y ago
> I want you to find my product, compare it will full transparency to the other products, and go with mine if it best suits you. Anybody who behaves differently I immediately assume to be behaving in bad faith and is not actually confident in their product on its own merits. Totally agree. I think this why I hated the enterprise sales dance so much -- if somebody doesn't want to buy, I don't want to sell; if they don't know what they're buying, they probably aren't the type of customer I'm looking for i.e. likely to become a support burden.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

that_guy_iain 2y ago

> There are numerous products I likely would have purchased, but I either find a substitute or just go without because I won't play the stupid "let's get on a call" game. > I've rolled-my-own solution more than once as well when there were no other good competitors. I don't want to be rude but this sounds like terrible business decisions. I would say this is a case of cutting your nose off to spite your face but I suspect it's not your money your wasting rolling-your-own solution. Like it normally costs a lot more in dev resources to build instead of buying. And it seems like your doing it because of your ego and your unwillingness to play stupid games.

freedomben 2y ago
That's a significant over-simplification and ends up wrong in many cases. Build vs. buy is largely the same equation as rent vs. own in real estate or automobiles. Generally speaking, in the short term renting is almost always cheaper, but there's a break-even point at which buying (aka building) becomes cheaper. Owning the system also grants considerable ability to build it to be exactly what you need, instead of hacking around deficiencies and/or begging your account manager to get your feature approved and implemented. There are plenty of situations in which the terrible business decision is to rent instead of build. The difficulty is that without knowing the future it's not always clear, so you have to use your best judgment and hope you get it right. Edit: Also don't forget that roll-your-own doesn't necessarily mean starting something from scratch. In many cases I opted to use and self-host an open source project that sometimes is sufficient all on its own, and when not we can make changes to it. I almost never start a non-trivial project from scratch just to avoid buying, unless it's a major piece of our product or value proposition in which case you have to consider the risk of building on a foundation you don't control.
- that_guy_iain 2y ago
  > Build vs. buy is largely the same equation as rent vs. own in real estate or automobiles. I would say this is not a valid analogy. If you buy real estate you have an asset. However, if you build something that is not your core product you have a liability and not an asset. You're not going to get more money because you have a bunch of tech you built that you could have bought.

burnte 2y ago

I'm 100% agreement, right down to the CTO/CIO role. I just don't do business with them, period. I have a strict rule not to do business with people how cold call/cold email, hide info, and force pointless meetings. Once salesmen realize that I'm actually a very low maintenance customer who just knows what they want, they love me, I'm free commission to them because they never have to expend energy on me.

alon_11 2y ago

That’s so true, I have seen a company that offer a chat over Slack, so basically did the entire qualification you mentioned over the chat and gave me some high level data I needed before a full demo call. 2 minutes, no sales fluff. That’s was a nice touch.

TZubiri 2y ago

Not being upfront about prices is a major red flag, I associate it with someone selling pyramid schemes, or snake oil. If I ask price and you insist on showing me a presentation to get me hooked and invested, I'm out. At that point you are bound to be talking to a salesman whose job it is to sell and you are experiencing a process that was designed and perfected to manipulate you into buying. I don't want to buy from salesmen usually, directly from the manufacturer or provider is better, cut the middleman out. OTOH I have to be open to some imperfections, if we have to wait for someone or be inexperienced with sales process (introduction too long), that's fine. On some industries it's possible for someone to do the work without saying price even. An electrician might be happy to do the work without talking about price, and then you have almost no recourse when it's a shitload.