Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

This isn't for B2B - I've seen this a lot in daycares and high-end cars. Generally, it's a way to signal "if you have to ask, you can't afford it"

Again I can vouche for seeing this in the physical industrial world. Sales only care about landing big deals with big margins, couldn't care less about many, many small fish. They wine and dine big clients and then build summer homes in the local hot spots off those projects commissions.

"Professional" subreddits, such as /r/MSP, as well as the Spiceworks community will have answers for some of those, depending on what kind of SaaS it is exactly. Ask, oftentimes (former) vendor reps or happy/unhappy customers lurk there and are happy to help you out, although their info might be outdated - but it may help for a first orientation.

(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.

I have pricing on my site revpilots.com for various enterprise software that is normally not listed publicly. We'll even get on calls for you to get pricing.