No, in fact you should consider it a relevant signal contributing to the UX of a site: if you're appalled by seeing this on a site, you are vrey very likely not a good fit for them and vice versa.
Ask HN: Is “contact us for pricing” a dark pattern?
31–40 of 82 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is “contact us for pricing” a dark pattern?
#32Rule of thumb: Assume any SAAS company with a "Contact us for pricing" will cost at least $20k per year.
If your price point is much less than this you should probably just have users self-service with a credit card.
Re: Ask HN: Is “contact us for pricing” a dark pattern?
#33Wow! A lot of fast replies here without much substance. "A dark pattern is "a user interface that has been carefully crafted to trick users into doing things, such as buying overpriced insurance with their purchase or signing up for recurring bills"."[0] By this definition, no, it's not a dark pattern. It may be a pricing strategy that you don't like, but not a dark pattern. It's an invitation to start a full discuss…
I agree with this answer. While I don't like the approach, I don't think it's a dark pattern. I applaud your effort to distinguish them, though; diluting words by overloading them is a disservice to language.
Re: Ask HN: Is “contact us for pricing” a dark pattern?
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
I prefer ranges. Not all candidates are same even for the same job. If I hire an A player, I may give them a bit more to sweeten the deal. If I hire a B player (who is good enough for the role but is not an A player so far), I would negotiate the compensation a little early on as long as it is something the candidate B accepts. Range gives you the floor (if they are honest). Let's say the range is 65k-85K, then its f…
I’ve never understood this logic, can’t you just create different roles?
What if the candidate applies to the wrong one, but would be suitable for a different one. At that point it's not much different to just having a range on their in the first place.
Re: Ask HN: Is “contact us for pricing” a dark pattern?
#35Enterprises often want your solution to integrate with so many other pieces of software that you are firmly out of "list prices" territory and very much in "let's design a solution that fits all these unique needs... and also has to run on-prem, because of this or that regulation" one, instead.
If your needs are served by the standard packages and you want to hook the thing up to your Slack for notifications, that's super. There is a pricing plan for that.
If you need basically a full year's worth of effort to hook this service up to your environment, and you want the experts involved with doing this integration, there's a kind of pricing plan for that, too.
The latter just does not look reasonable on a web page, because it starts with "it depends" and scales (non-?)linearly.
Re: Ask HN: Is “contact us for pricing” a dark pattern?
#36Rule of thumb: Assume any SAAS company with a "Contact us for pricing" will cost at least $20k per year. If your price point is much less than this you should probably just have users self-service with a credit card.
Right. I treat "contact us for pricing" as the corporate equivalent of "if you have to ask, you can't afford it".
Re: Ask HN: Is “contact us for pricing” a dark pattern?
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve never understood this logic, can’t you just create different roles?
What if the candidate applies to the wrong one, but would be suitable for a different one. At that point it's not much different to just having a range on their in the first place.
it's completely different - Google for example will down level you based on performance. if you have candidates that have the same job with wildly different salaries which just exacerbates arbitrary inequities. the range solution also creates problems when handling promotions
the one who benefits the most from the "range" solution is the employer, really.
Re: Ask HN: Is “contact us for pricing” a dark pattern?
#38Wow! A lot of fast replies here without much substance. "A dark pattern is "a user interface that has been carefully crafted to trick users into doing things, such as buying overpriced insurance with their purchase or signing up for recurring bills"."[0] By this definition, no, it's not a dark pattern. It may be a pricing strategy that you don't like, but not a dark pattern. It's an invitation to start a full discuss…
It all comes down to whether it's a product-led or sales-led company.
Product-led companies usually have plans for all usage sizes including custom plans for large enterprises.
Sales-led almost always don't want to be in business with the long-tail of the market. That sales call is their way of effectively filtering those customers out.
see also: https://blog.close.com/product-led-sales-led-marketing-led/
Re: Ask HN: Is “contact us for pricing” a dark pattern?
#39I think it's a bad marketing technique. As a developer, I'm asked to evaluate competing technologies all the time and pick one. I can see what your competitors charge. "Contact us for pricing" means you're out of the running. I know, it's a sales technique, but it's one that just cost you business.
The business execs that I'd have to involve to contact you for pricing are, firstly - cheap, secondly - are probably going to outnegotiate you, thirdly - introduces a whole level of complexity to the process that I'd rather just pick your competitor and ask for approval.
Re: Ask HN: Is “contact us for pricing” a dark pattern?
#40When I'm looking for pricing, I'm looking for order of magnitude, and enterprise sales guys want me to invest hours of meetings just to get that because it's an investment/sunk cost to them, but as an architect, it's really just a question of "does this scale in single digit multiples of $10, $100, $1,000 $10,000, or $100,000?" and I don't want to sit through what some of us have come to call their stupid time-share presentation.
But the reason they do those dumb meetings is it seems related to their performance measurement, which is ultimately by revenue, but it is a function of deals and their stage through their sales pipeline. How do you measure the quarterly performance of a sales person when the average enterprise sales cycle can be 6-18 months? Number of deals in the pipeline per stage and probability of that revenue landing.
By forcing stupid meetings to get the most minor bit of information, they can move my "deal," into a pipeline stage that improves the perception of their performance numbers, independently of whether revenue is ultimately realized. If you are a startup they need those numbers for projections that go into investor and analyst presentations that get you the funding to stay alive, and it's why you don't want engineers to say something or add information that will collapse the superposition of everyone's ability to believe long enough to survive to a more stable state.
My experience has been that enterprise sales are bizarre political intrigues that are divorced from features and product qualities, where concreteness itself becomes the enemy. So, tl;dr: "contact us for pricing," isn't so much a dark pattern as it is the outer edge of an infinite existential void.
I'm sure there is a more optimistic explanation though.