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Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

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Re: Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

#101

Post by kube-system »

autoexec wrote: post #89
kube-system wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're right that for purely custom solutions it's understandable, but a base price could often be made public for a lot of products and services that don't offer one. Certainly anyone asking for something special expects to have to negotiate on what that's going to cost them above the standard price.

It really depends on the nature of the software and the target customer as to whether that makes sense. The spectrum of what "SaaS" is, is just so insanely broad that it's hard to make any sweeping statement here.

Re: Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

#102

Post by indymike »

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".

As a reformed former VP of Sales, I can assure that this is exactly how it works, except with much better research than Google.

Re: Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

#103

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

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.

Because they'd rather get $500K, but getting $255K is better than getting $0K.

Re: Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

#104

Post by kube-system »

chasd00 wrote: post #94
jedberg wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If a customer is paying you late because they think you won't/can't do anything about it, it seems the same disregard could apply to their payment of late fees.

Re: Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

#106

Post by indymike »

Contact Us Pricing has different meanings based on company size:

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.

Re: Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

#107

Post by cj »

chasd00 wrote: post #94
jedberg wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Technically, yes. But in practice, it's rarely worth the time or effort to collect.

Re: Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

#108

Post by Thespian2 »

autoexec wrote: post #79
rco8786 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> due to the idea that potential customers will immediately click away if the price seems too high 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.

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…

We may not like it, but your last point is almost the exact definition of what a "price" is. Things don't have objective "prices" as an intrinsic quality. They don't even have "reasonable" prices intrinsically. A price is no more, and no less than an agreement between buyer and seller to make a transaction happen.

"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.

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