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

91–100 of 173 posts

Re: Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

#91

Post by jedberg »

cj wrote: post #61
wwkeyboard wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> always at least 2 weeks late, as a rule of thumb

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.

Re: Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

#92

Post by chasd00 »

kube-system wrote: post #86
autoexec wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read it as: the company doesn't have set pricing but rather has a sales person/department that will charge you more than the next person for the exact same product/service if they have any reason to suspect they can get away with it after learning as much as they can about your finances and only after wasting your time on a high pressure sales pitch. If someone refuses to openly list prices they're either: - Embarr…

Enterprise SaaS customers are notorious for demanding one-off features, special packages, customizations, or hundreds of hours of meetings. For complicated enterprise products where these requests are inevitable, special pricing is inevitable. There's a large and very lucrative industry around just implementing SaaS software.

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

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.

Re: Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

#93

Post by stevage »

mozman wrote: post #27
bilekas wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah maybe I'm a bit more cynical than you but the idea of contact us pricing for me has always been "dependa how much money you have and how much we can squeeze" also the idea of guaging how "critical" the service is for you. 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 re…

Vendor list pricing is absurd. Real story but using made up numbers below: I spoke with a vendor last week who came in at 500k. I told them my budget was 250k, price came back at 255k.

I mean that's how I would price it too.

Re: Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

#94

Post by chasd00 »

jedberg wrote: post #91
cj wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> always at least 2 weeks late, as a rule of thumb 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…

if the contract your client signed said net-30 then wouldn't a 90 day payment incur 60 days of late fees and another invoice? i feel like you could rinse/repeat that forever. It would be like a subscription to late fees.

Re: Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

#95

Post by chosen1x »

johngalt wrote: post #13

There isn't a hidden price that is only shown in the sales funnel. But rather the price changes depending on the customer. '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.

This is the answer that should top the list.

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.

Re: Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

#96

Post by bilekas »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #75
Spivak wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right. My point is more about misleading presentation. The landing page will try to convince you the company is offering an amazing product that will solve your problems, when the reality is, the product doesn't exist and the company is trying to get you to fund it.

It's funny you bring this up because a startup i was involved in at the beginning did something similar. I was one of the seniors and we would have proposed "ideas" for what could be done with the product. The next day the sales people were selling those features .. unfortunately it created a huge divide between sales and development that ultimately couldn't be overcome.

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.

Re: Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

#97

Post by celestialcheese »

philip1209 wrote: post #35

There's some interesting data in the debt proceedings for the event startup Pollen: 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

Very interesting - although probably difficult to glean any kind of generalizable pricing data because some of those vendors could have let unpaid bills slide longer than others.

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.

Re: Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

#98

Post by colinmhayes »

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".

Price discrimination is good actually. Why shouldn't you charge the fortune 500 company more than the cash strapped start up? Good for your business, and lets you sell to the startup for less and still have the same revenue.

Re: Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

#99

Post by AdamJacobMuller »

xmonkee wrote: post #9
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.

I'll defend it because I'm doing it: We have a very very young company, and we are building our product with our customers. We are in fact charging very little right now with the understanding that our product is immature, and later we plan to increase pricing to get to a profitable level. There is absolutely no way to come up with any sort of standard pricing for us, since each customer means a lot of feature and cu…

It's a different question when you're in an MVP stage and for very different reasons.

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."

Re: Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

#100

Post by chasd00 »

paxys wrote: post #68
supernova87a wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

also if you screw up bad enough as a spacex customer and not meet their payload requirements after so many failed attempts then they refuse to ever do business with you again.
Post reply on HN