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Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

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Re: Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

#121

Post by ganoushoreilly »

kube-system wrote: post #104
chasd00 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sometimes, they'll go as far as stiffing your payment just because.. what are you going to due, sue a Global 100 entity?

It's absurd, that's why I like working with smaller companies.

Re: Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

#122

Post by WastingMyTime89 »

kube-system wrote: post #104
chasd00 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean they will pay them if you escalate to legal but you won’t be able to do business with them again.

Re: Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

#124

Post by tptacek »

One trick, just to ballpark this --- it probably worked better 10 years ago than today, but I checked a couple vendors and got results --- is to Google the vendor and "GSA price list" (for their FedGov pricing).

Re: Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

#125

Post by fxtentacle »

Just email them :)

Its easy to tell them in the email to not call you back. Plus you can instruct them to include a specific word in their reply subject line so that you can quickly filter to see who read your instructions and who didn't. It's a bit like that concert M&M check.

Re: Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

#126

Post by WastingMyTime89 »

malfist wrote: post #64
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.

The keyword here is estimated. That’s only a ballpark number. I think they did that because they were severely undercutting the competition and they want people who wouldn’t have thought about it to call their sales team. It’s not the final price.

Re: Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

#127

Post by sdfhbdf »

fxtentacle wrote: post #125

Just email them :) Its easy to tell them in the email to not call you back. Plus you can instruct them to include a specific word in their reply subject line so that you can quickly filter to see who read your instructions and who didn't. It's a bit like that concert M&M check.

> concert M&M check

For anyone that does not immediately recognize it refers to a popular trope that Van Halen contractually required venues to always sort M&Ms to not have brown ones. It is said this was their canary (in the coal mine) that was supposed to indicate if the venue took obligations seriously and hence will the concert be safe and up to standards.

This has a mixed review on snopes.com so take it with a grain of salt but it's a nice idea: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brown-out/

Re: Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

#128

Post by PeterisP »

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.

A base price can only be made public if there exists a base price that would be common among customers - however if it's not priced as a commodity, that's not the case, there simply is not a base price that could be disclosed because there is zero expectation that there should be "the same service" available for the same price, or that there is some base price from which discounts are negotiated or something like that. They want to preserve the ability to have wildly different pricing for different customers, and publishing (or even having internally published) some fixed base price works against that.

If they want to sell their services as custom services, that's the business model - and in this case, they want to make a clear point from the very beginning that this is not a commodity and every deal is a bespoke deal. Even if the technical platform is the same, every business relationship is custom and individually negotiated, with zero expectation that the price you get is in any way related to the prices someone else gets - sometimes that works against you, sometimes that works for you, but that's the business model they've chosen.

Re: Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

#129

Post by yellowapple »

kube-system wrote: post #104
chasd00 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You'd think "suspend service until outstanding invoices are paid in full" would be in the "things which you would/can do about it" category.

Re: Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

#130

Post by clnq »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #126
malfist wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The keyword here is estimated . That’s only a ballpark number. I think they did that because they were severely undercutting the competition and they want people who wouldn’t have thought about it to call their sales team. It’s not the final price.

Estimated is fantastic. That's almost all I need before deciding who to buy practically identical SaaS from.
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