Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 173 posts

Re: Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

#61

Post by cj »

wwkeyboard wrote: post #19
gunapologist99 wrote: post #10

As you already know, this is typical for "enterprise" software due to the idea that potential customers will immediately click away if the price seems too high, so you need to let your customer know what value is in your software before they immediately walk away. 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-…

That's a much more generous take than I had. I always assumed "contact us" pricing meant "tell us who you work for so we can google their funding level before suggesting a price to you".

Whether or not your company has a procurement department should always be part of the equation when pricing enterprise deals. (Funding is an indicator of whether your company has one)

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.

Re: Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

#62

Post by yamtaddle »

gunapologist99 wrote: post #10

As you already know, this is typical for "enterprise" software due to the idea that potential customers will immediately click away if the price seems too high, so you need to let your customer know what value is in your software before they immediately walk away. 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-…

Don't forget that "contact us" pricing also gives vendor managers something to do, and the ability to brag about whatever discount they negotiate (and it hardly matters if everyone gets that "discount").

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.

Re: Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

#64

Post by malfist »

gunapologist99 wrote: post #10

As you already know, this is typical for "enterprise" software due to the idea that potential customers will immediately click away if the price seems too high, so you need to let your customer know what value is in your software before they immediately walk away. 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-…

Counterpoint: https://www.spacex.com/rideshare/

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.

Re: Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

#65

Post by pclmulqdq »

My SaaS has only "Contact Sales" pricing right now because I currently don't have the infrastructure set up to sell to you in any other way. If the SaaS companies are young, they may be in the same situation. You could get a good deal by clicking the button.

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.

Re: Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

#66

Post by imagine99 »

gunapologist99 wrote: post #10

As you already know, this is typical for "enterprise" software due to the idea that potential customers will immediately click away if the price seems too high, so you need to let your customer know what value is in your software before they immediately walk away. 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-…

> As a general rule, any software which requires "contact us" is going to be somewhere between $50k and $750k

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".

Re: Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

#67

Post by Spivak »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #47
brookst wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the product. If it's off-the-shelf and every customer just does DIY deployment, 100% agree. 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 i…

Or, if you're dealing with a startup, there's a chance the product doesn't actually exist and they'll want to lock you in a deal that gives them more concrete requirements and funds the MVP. This is based on a bet that programmers can crank out code faster than the enterprise customer can finalize the deal. In the past, I've dealt with a startup that not only did just that, but also used the non-final deal with one v…

It has never ever been a bad strategy to get paid to build a product rather than building something and hoping there’s a market.

This is the way to do enterprise sales.

Re: Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

#68

Post by paxys »

supernova87a wrote: post #14
AdamJacobMuller wrote: post #3

Unlikely you'll find any good source. "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.

Sometimes I ask sales people of these companies, "why is it that SpaceX can give me a price for launching something into space, with detailed manuals about how to prepare all my interfaces, but you have to take 2 weeks to think about how much to charge me?" 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…

You cannot tell SpaceX to move up their launch date for you. You cannot send a payload that exceeds the weight or size limits. You cannot tell them that you don't like the color of the rocket since it doesn't fit with your brand. As far as sales go, it's easy for SpaceX to publish their prices because it's the most rigid type of service possible.

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.

Post reply on HN