One take-away from this is the old "if you have to ask, you can't afford it", and another is that they're automatically filtering out lower-value or price-sensitive customers.

However, an obvious counterpoint is that Atlassian built a multi-billion-dollar business around up-front pricing, and even seem to still offer that up-front pricing today.

As a general rule, any software which requires "contact us" is going to be somewhere between $50k and $750k, generally annually, (usually for a fully-loaded site license on the high end), but there are definitely exceptions above and below. Certainly there are companies in some industries (WorkDay, Oracle, SalesForce, etc) that are known for being extremely expensive, and there are certainly many companies that would like to get into an upper tier but just aren't quite there yet, and smaller startups (esp non-VC funded) are often on the low end.

Smaller companies without procurement departments are quicker and faster to contract with and they pay on time. Bigger companies with procurement departments request last minute contract redlines and never pay on time (always at least 2 weeks late, as a rule of thumb).

“Contact us” pricing might benefit you if you are smaller. If you’re at a bigger company, the headache of dealing with your procurement department will inevitably (and justifiably) drive up the price - it’s the bureaucracy tax.

Oh man! As consultant I hated that. They would pay 90 days late and just say "sorry, we always pay 90 days after we get the invoice". They know I don't have the resources to sue them, nor would I. And they really had no reason to hold it other than making sure they get the interest instead of me.

Sure maybe it takes a few days to validate the invoice, but 90 days was ridiculous.

Even worse was when I was on the corporate side. I was working with a small vendor and our company had a 90 day wait as policy, but the company refused to deliver the items until they got the money. I really needed the items, so I have to move mountains to get our procurement to cut a check ASAP.

It’s a lot of effort to keep going so it may just be more hassle than it’s worth. On the other hand, nothing wrong with that process if you’re within the terms of the contract. When the number gets large enough it will get escalated and, when you show your work, get paid and the payment clerk will get their hand slapped.

It's absurd, that's why I like working with smaller companies.

They know I don't have a choice to turn down that work just because I don't like the 90 day rule, and they only have that rule so they can keep money in their bank account longer.

And when I was on the corporate side, the vendor specifically would not do the work for me because they didn't agree to the 90 day terms, so I had to fight with my own people to get them paid faster so I could work with them.

It's just a pain all around.

…hell, if I have to speak to a human when I don’t think it’s necessary, then we probably won’t do business.

----

¹: https://www.spacex.com/media/Capabilities&Services.pdf

I’m expecting spacex is different because we already know intuitively that launching something is expensive and we know there are only a small number of vendors with which to do so. So space launch companies probably don’t have the same issue…

If that price tag is big enough to "scare away" a customer, then that'll be true with or without the extra contact info collection and sales call(s) and email spam. Like I said: might as well not have the vendor and customer mutually waste each others' time with a bunch of sales ceremony that has no hope of actually producing a sale.

I really wish that were the case. Alas, more and more sellers think it makes them look cool and enterprise-y if they go the "contact us" route. Possibly the most ridiculous I encountered was a browser plugin startup offering that ended up costing something like $2/month/user with a 20 user minimum but even during the demo they were all about "Fortune 500 this and national ISPs that".

As far as actual very large enterprises are concerned (pardon the pun), there might even be some truth to that: I know procurement guys who would only buy if they got the white-glove/wine-and-dine treatment and would have never bought something with a corporate credit card on a website that said "click to buy 35,000 licenses now" (you can do that with Atlassian IIRC).

Fair enough.

But for 99% of companies (i.e. SMB) it's just annoying to the extreme, especially if you have to do this more than once per year because your org is restructuring, your CTO is actually the CFO and reads marketing whitepapers and case studies to follow the latest tech fads, or you're in consulting.

I say, offer both: An SMB plan with listed pricing (segment further at your leisure) and an Enterprise option with "call us". If you don't want SMB business, be honest about it and say "enterprise only, we only do bespoke, don't call if your budget is <50k".

I once had to find software options for a company I worked for. I had a deadline to meet for that, plus my regular duties.

That meant that any company that had "Call for pricing" didn't make the cut. I don't have time for that.

We ended up spending $120,000 on the solution I chose. I don't know if we could have gotten a better deal from another vendor, because they wanted to play games. I don't have time for games.

The company that was honest and up-front about the pricing got the contract, which I know has renewed several times since then.

It seems so sleezy in the way that sales generally gets a bad reputation.

There shouldn't be any problem with having the pricing on the site if it's all above board. That way you're actually reducing the wasted hours of sales people who have to determine if you're even a potential customer.

But many of these products have lots of different modules, and customers don't always know which ones they need. And some nearly require assistance/consulting with deployment, the complexity of which varies depending on environment.

So from the company's point of view, they don't want to put "$200k" on the website if the actual price is between $100k and $1m depending on customer specifics. It will scare off smaller customers and upset bigger customers.

But yeah if it's just one-size-fits-all, download-and-install SW, pricing should be listed.

In the past, I've dealt with a startup that not only did just that, but also used the non-final deal with one very large customer to try and get similar deals started with several other large companies, with half the pitch being just "we're about to deploy our solution at ${very large and well-known international you've heard of}".

This is the way to do enterprise sales.

I understand the insentive is to sell, but there has to be a balancing line between sales and development, both can't work solely independent.

I spoke with a vendor last week who came in at 500k. I told them my budget was 250k, price came back at 255k.

If you only count operational costs and a hypothetical skeleton crew to maintain it it probably costs damn near nothing to add another customer.

But once you include the salaries of 20 to 2000 engineers and the rest of the business to support them it’s a whole different ballgame. A major feature that takes one team 6 weeks to build costs a little less than half a mil in engineer salaries.

Software by its nature is weighted heavily in upfront costs and so pricing is “how little can we afford to charge to be in the black with ARR, how much do our competitors charge, and how much would it cost you to build it yourself.”

That's not how I read these at all. "Contact Us" means the company doesn't have set pricing but rather will have a sales person/department that will structure a specific deal and negotiate a contract for your business's specific needs.

If someone refuses to openly list prices they're either:

  - Embarrassed by the amount of money they're charging  

  - Aware they charge more than others and don't want to let you comparison shop easily 

  - Planning on setting as high a price as possible depending on how much you can be fleeced into paying

"how much you can be fleeced into paying" while a proactive way to phrase it, is also "What you are willing to pay." Key words - "you are willing". If it's too high, then it isn't a price, as there is no agreement.

Seller wants highest price, and buyer wants lowest.

When it's a commodity, like apples at the store, with many sellers of a basically undifferentiated product, prices average out to something we think of as "fair." But when a product is unique, or there is a monopoly on it, seller has a huge advantage in pricing.

The difference is that most companies aren't pricing their goods to the maximum amount they think they can get from you personally. They instead price things according to what the majority of their target market is willing to pay.

You can say that ultimately it still comes down to paying only what you're willing to spend, but I might be willing to spend $20 on something, yet also be unwilling to spend $20 on it if I know you've been charging everybody else $12 for that same product. Consumers find personalized dynamic pricing to be unfair and discriminatory and for good reason. There's a really big difference between a company who uses their advantage in pricing to screw over everybody for extra profit and one who uses their advantage to personally screw you over in order to take more from you than they could normally get away with.

Publicly disclosed prices that apply equally to everyone puts a boundary on much a company can take advantage of any one person.

There's a large and very lucrative industry around just implementing SaaS software.

If they want to sell their services as custom services, that's the business model - and in this case, they want to make a clear point from the very beginning that this is not a commodity and every deal is a bespoke deal. Even if the technical platform is the same, every business relationship is custom and individually negotiated, with zero expectation that the price you get is in any way related to the prices someone else gets - sometimes that works against you, sometimes that works for you, but that's the business model they've chosen.

The last decade of my career has been multi-million dollar project after project of just setting up and customizing enterprise SaaS software for a customer's specific need.

If you're talking to larger companies, thing FAANG, then they have a list price and discount levels that can act as incentives, levers or there are other options for inducement. Otherwise, you give the sales team the authority on go-to-market strategy while they are executing individual deals (tactics). Senior sales leaders can authorize some of those discounts and any special inducements or incentives have to be custom written into contracts by legal + deal desk, making them more time intensive and less desirable.

I take it as a sign that when they do give you a quote, it’s up for negotiation and you should never agree to the first number presented.

But this is nonsensical optimisation imo. At these price points, the ability to negotiate should be evident to anyone who has bought such products before.

It's also the case that if something goes wrong the first question is often "do we have a contact at X?" and if you've gone through the "contact us" pricing dance, the answer is probably "yes", or at least "maybe', while if you use self-serve public-pricing plans, the answer is probably "no". Managers like having a named person to bug about problems, so the vendor manager gets to look more competent if they have one, even if the outcome's the same as if they didn't.

Besides, all pricing is "contact us" for enterprises. They don't pay what's on the sticker, even if there is one.

If you pay for a product or service and when something goes wrong your only contact is some jerk in sales that means you fucked up bad. Support options and contacts should have been determined and documented long before you spend a single cent.

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

The problem is that this SaaS business needs to find a pricing model which net's them 1 million per customer. Charging too little means the business will starve, too much means that customers won't sign up. Sales & Contract negotiations can help arrive at the right number. Guessing the pricing model after 1-2 customers can break the business if you don't have infinite VC money.

SpaceX publicly lists all their prices. If they can list a price tag for a falcon heavy it $97m on their website, these crappy SaaS vendors can list their prices too.

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

That’s one way of seeing it which is not necessarily generous.

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

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

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

My company has standard pricing for all offerings (including cloud operation and support services) but we have said 'Contact Us' for years. The reason: we have a better chance of closing if we actually interact with prospects. We don't charge more for the privilege.

Just $0.02 from my personal experience.

The trick is to make the case that the price is cheap for them, given that they get more out of the software than what it costs.

But yah, they for sure aren't going to be $49 or whatever a month.

Total likely value of the business relationship if solution widely adopted inside prospect

What options does winning this deal create? In particular what will the vendor learn and will this relationship open the door to new niches, segments, markets?

What is the value of a reference / testimonial from this particular prospect?

Two related blog posts for startups who need to manage an enterprise sales process:

https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2008/11/12/negotiate-the-level...

https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2013/02/16/price-based-on-your...

(I, too, consider price-hiding the bane of my existence and wish I could get those days and months of lifetime back that I spend going through useless "demos" and "quick calls with an evangelist/key account manager/person who nopes out at the first technical question".)

Another strategy is that you prepare a long-ish text that you email to a - perferrably senior - sales contact at each company, ideally one that has been referred to you (again, the above-mentioned sources may help).

Just change the name and first line mentioning their product and outline that "due to internal restructuring" your company will decide yea or nay "on doing a PoC within the next three working days" (i.e. you don't have time to waste on demos), that you are already very familiar with their product in all details from an earlier job, in fact, you want to recommend to your CTO to buy it, and that you wish to receive nothing more than their current pricing for $detailedreqs asap. Be overspecific as to your reqs and specs, so they can't weasel out with "it depends".

You might need to go one or two rounds where they try and talk you into doing calls/demos regardless but they will often CC more senior or local reps whose contacts are not public and if you push back repeating what you said in your first email but shorter, they will usually relent, especially if there are competitors in the field and they're getting afraid that the lead may go cold.

This strategy works maybe about 78.3% of the time but will likely fail if the SaaS offering does require extensive and bespoke customisation for your organisation.

Good luck, I really don't envy you having to go through this, to me it used to be like running the gauntlet.

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

Yes I know the comparison isn't quite right, but sometimes you just have to put some pressure on bro salespeople coming in, making shit up, and trying to test how willing you are to pay for something they haven't even built yet, and pricing it to maximally extract value later. Otherwise they'll start to think it's reasonable.

Enterprise SaaS is the exact opposite. The product that is listed on the website is just a starting point. There are teams of sales reps, account managers, solutions architects and more who will customize it exactly to the customer's liking, and all that needs to be priced.

At the heart of it, the ridiculous pricing practices of "contact us" pricing are to test what a customer is willing to pay.

Have a look at this ML-favorite lately. $50/month for a general user turns into something you will not believe for corporate users. Totally testing what they can get away with. https://wandb.ai/site/pricing

Without knowing literally anything about what you're doing, I would still suggest you try to put some price where you can't lose money on the site with a group/bulk/quantity discounts available button. Especially put the same button on all the pricing pages inside your UI/interface as well. When people think you're too expensive, you want to confront them with "hey, let's talk."

The company should care, probably, but there are also reasons for some companies to prefer high touch interactions - it gives huge insight from a product perspective, and can provide insights to tackle other verticals they might otherwise struggle to even know existed.

Going in volume does make good numbers though, if you’re setup in a way that you can keep it going. Toyota, Honda, etc. have very solid fleet and ‘pay the flat rate and go’ markets they serve.

https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/the-scoop-pollen/

Some snippets on their debts, which you cold normalize for their ~150 employees:

- Monday.com: ￡515k

- AWS: ￡105k

- Airtable: ￡7k

Also, how is Monday.com owed ￡515k on a company of 315 employees? That's 1.5k/employee, so if it's an annual contract they didn't pay, that's $150/user/month?

Seems _wild_ expensive. If that's accurate, no wonder Monday.com is able to spend so much on paid ads.

> Asked the company: they've not responded yet.

https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1583401575715741696?...

The price-hiding tactic is a little rude: jewlery stores helped pioneer it, the idea being to get the customer hooked on the item before they think about price, and to imagine the largest number they might be okay with paying ahead of time, while simultaneously making them unsure whether it's too low or not.

I don't like dealing with companies who do that sort of thing and I worry what other curve balls they have in store later on. So I opt out.

The reason that you can use this on enterprise sales is that you are theoretically offering something that the enterprise needs, no matter how painful the process is -- and there are typically few competitors for them to turn to. Many of the competitors use the same tactic. Hence, we see it all over in that world.

'Contact us' = 'give us enough information to accurately price the product for you.'

Best way to shortcut the process would be to work with a channel/var that has a majority of the items in their portfolio.

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

Best of luck.

Newish Companies: they haven't been able to figure out how to price their product yet.

Growth Companies: We're revenue optimizing every deal.

"Sales Driven" (as opposed to "product driven): We have to justify the existence of our sales team.

Hyper competitive companies: I'm not publishing a price because someone will scrape it and beat us by $1.

Large Companies: Our pricing is a four-dimensional matrix with multiple elevators, and we need a team of people to figure out which spreadsheet and which tab to look up x and y to price your deal.

It's pretty common in custom manufacturing (which makes sense) but also companies that purchase product/services from others and re-sell them as part of a larger whole. Some folks also don't understand that pricing doesn't have to exactly match your product.

I think there is also value for certain lines of business for having a customer meet the sales team and possibly an account manager before using the product, usually if the product has some kind of learning curve or domain specific knowledge where insiders can unlock value.

Hate to say it but you're basically only going to find out by going through the sales funnel. Some of them may even turn you down for simply saying "we're evaluating X and would like to know the price".

One problem is probably that a lot of companies pull enterprise pricing out of their ass (or there's too many confounding factors that make it look like that), and the other big problem was already mentioned, they're trying to maximize your spending.

In my experience, #1 is by far the most common for a SaaS.

The rationale of "if you have to ask" falls apart because you could just put a high price on your site to filter out the cheapskates.

I also find that when evaluating a new product, my first click on their site is the pricing page. It is a semi-standardized way to quickly see the significant features offered without all the verbose prose that you'll find on the product pages.

Maybe something like that could help you / maybe there is a business opportunity there to do aggregated sales calls so these companies can be compared side-by-side (though they probably would give inflated rates like hospitals do because they know insurance will knock the prices down).

Generally, the less you charge, the more infrastructure is involved in collecting payment - metered SaaS companies can charge you in increments of a few dollars but are backed by complex billing software, while enterprise sales is an invoice from quickbooks (I'm exaggerating a little bit about the level of automation here, but it's close to this).

Personally, the price for my "contact sales" product is a lot less than a typical "enterprise sales" product, with the price range being $10-50k. Some other young SaaS companies I have heard of are lower than that. Conversely, established companies with a "contact sales" button tend to start at $50k/year and go up from there to millions.

If you take control of the process during the call, and tell them "no" if they give you BS, you can probably get a price.

But I feel your pain. Trying to compare preschool tuitions is a nightmare because they only want to tell you if you go for a visit.

Companies flock to us to buy software because they are fed up with "Contact Sales", opaque pricing, expiring discounts, and the games associated with sales. Buyers of software are rapidly opting out of sellers' sales processes, coming to Vendr, and asking us to do it for them. Sales is broken.

Today, sellers focus on creating sales processes that maximize the leverage and outcomes for the sellers. This creates friction resulting in avg 90 days sales cycles and 20-25% close rates for sellers. Not good. No wonder sales and marketing expense equals ~50% of revenue.

When Vendr's successful, we'll have fixed sales. No more games. Fair pricing, correct and fast buying decisions -- powered by data. This results in a win for the seller (lower cost acquisition; shorter sales cycles) and a win for the buyer (best products win; fair pricing).

LMK if you need help with any of the "contact us" pricing -- we can easily answer this for you. ryan@vendr.com

If it is a COTS offering that is likely to be used in the US Govt, I recommend trying to find your product on GSA Advantage [0], but it is helpful to have the manufacturer's part number handy, which often takes a consultation with a sales entity. Good luck!

[0] https://www.gsaadvantage.gov/

End of month reports are always a good time, End of quarter even better, Triple witching week is the best. Sometimes you get lucky and some middle-manager-muckity-muck is only $X thousands from the bonus target... and thats when you find your deals. Start early and be prepared to wait.

Probably not. Have had good success in the past posting random stuff on reddit, like "I'm paying 12000 / core for Oracle, am I high? Is this common?" in r/sysadmin, and then having people correct me.

But for the most part SaaS ain't offer those prices online. Contact someone, set up time for a call, and get prices. This is why vendor managers, sales engineers, solution architects, etc. are a thing.

I'd also recommend only engaging with the top 3 better products before you go through such a big list.

Most of the time sales folks don’t want to quote you a ballpark right off the bat because they know that you’ll be expecting something like that number on the final proposal.

If they dodge giving you a price range then try approaching from a different angle, asking what’s the smallest implementation they’ve done (tell them it’s to make sure you’re not too small a project for them). Then ask them about their biggest client (they might start chatting your ear off so be ready to cut them off). Then ask them directly what they would charge for those exact same implementations.

You’ll end up with a huge 10k foot view, but you might be able to get that in a few days, then you can drill down into a few of the more suitable vendors.

Long version: First, my heart goes out to you. I was in charge of a lot of SaaS procurement for a number of years, and even as our company grew and our ability to pay went up, the lack of pricing transparency only became more frustrating to me! It used to be: “if we have to ask, we can’t afford it,” but then it became, “we can likely afford it, but it would be nice to make sure we should even talk to this vendor or industry before sitting through long eye-rolling sales calls.” (Or even worse, the 15 minute sales call with an intern to get you as a lead before you can talk to someone who knows anything.) but my blood pressure is rising, and I digress…

To level the playing field, we recently signed up with one of the “SaaS procurement” companies that has made this MUCH more tolerable. We use TropicApp.io, and have been happy with them and how they do business. They help us find and negotiate purchases. Even before we buy something, we can ask them stuff like, “we need a tool to do X. What are people using these days, and what is ballpark pricing and pricing model for a tool like that?” They (and their competitors) charge a percentage of the money they save you. They can’t help with smaller stuff (less than 5k per year), but are helpful with the rest. (Not affiliated with them or any competitors like Vendr.com - just happy that these companies exist now, and wish we’d found them sooner.)

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

For anyone that does not immediately recognize it refers to a popular trope that Van Halen contractually required venues to always sort M&Ms to not have brown ones. It is said this was their canary (in the coal mine) that was supposed to indicate if the venue took obligations seriously and hence will the concert be safe and up to standards.

This has a mixed review on snopes.com so take it with a grain of salt but it's a nice idea: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brown-out/

SaaS people: Don't make it hard for me to give you money. At the very least, give me a 30 day trial (of Enterprise features) while we go through your stupid sales dance.

Pricing can also vary based on how turn-key the product it. An enterprise CRM, for example, can be really hard to get pricing for as you are likely going to spend more on the implementation at first than on the actual licenses. In those cases the solution is also somewhat like buying insurance, where the expectation is that you have some customized add-ons and things that are specific to your environment.

Worst experience was a reporting tool for telecoms that was licensed by port. Devices used to have 4-8 ports but the year before suddenly it was feasible to ship 32-port devices to customers. This made the tool prohibitive.

My best experience was when a sales rep just called and told me the pricing range for their product: 5x our budget, without counting cost of migration. It was the most productive sales call I ever had.

1. If you're not going to spend time jumping OUR hoopes to talk with us, you're not that important, we don't care about you, little fish.

2. We won't quote our price because we want human-human time with you to maximize our quote based on how dumb you are. (how hard can we scam you out of money).

There might be a place in the world for a site where existing customers can anonymously report how much they've been quoted for named services at named companies. It'd be very convenient.

If you go through a third party vendor or MSP, they may also be able to give you more realistic pricing data based on existing customers.

But honestly, picking up a phone and calling is good practice anyway. If you can't get an honest ballpark estimate within 5 minutes that's not a company you want to work with anyway.

If you have enough options though, you can be upfront about it - hey I have a number of services to check, either you give me ballpark given this copypasta or I'm checking the other ones.

the hardest part is if their software required extensive integration and customization; that help would cost extra and the project would be largely it depends.

Think about it from the company's perspective. Let's imagine as a company, you do an experiment where you have one landing page that shows the pricing, and another landing page that says "contact us". Let's also imagine that your product is enough of an enterprise solution that no one ever buys it without talking to someone at some point during the evaluation process (even if the pricing is up front, it requires enough of an investment that the customer wants to be absolutely certain it will satisfy their needs both now and as they grow). Finally, let's imagine that you have 3 full-time sales people to handle the incoming communications at whatever step of the evaluation process.

Now, if the outcome of this experiment is that the "contact us for pricing" results in 1/5th the incoming contacts, but those then convert twice the rate, you might choose the up-front pricing (2x conversion rate but on 20% of the leads means only 40% the sales compared to up-front pricing).

However, what if the 5x incoming contacts is too many for your sales team of 3 to respond, causing the up-front pricing to result in fewer sales with more work? Then you might choose the "contact us for pricing".

But what if it's so many more incoming contacts at a consistent enough conversion rate that you can justify adding a 4th and 5th sales person to realize those sales? Then you might choose the up-front pricing.

But what if the up-front pricing pigeon-holes you into your beachhead market and makes it more difficult to expand vertically or horizontally, which could lead to a trail-off in the incoming contacts and sales? Then you might choose the "contact us for pricing".

The point is, the one that makes the most sense for a company depends on a lot of variables, most of which would be opaque to an outside observer. Being able to tell the difference between a company that has "contact us for pricing" because it made sense for them, compared to one trying to exploit price discrimination (as described by some of the more cynical takes) is next to impossible without talking with them. Even in that scenario though, if they end up giving you a better product for a better price, then being willing to reach out to them could end up being a competitive advantage for your company over another which disqualified them on that basis.