Ask HN: “Contact Us” Pricing

Post by juancn » Wed, Nov 02, 2022, 1:55 PM UTC

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-…

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Nov 02, 2022, 2:17 PM UTC

celestialcheese wrote: post #97

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…

Post by rco8786 » Wed, Nov 02, 2022, 3:33 PM UTC

Xaena wrote: post #82

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.

Having worked on pricing strategy, this is not what I've seen as the norm in B2B. If you're talking to an early company that is still working on product market fit, maybe, and definitely if you ask for your own features. If you're talking to larger companies, thing FAANG, then they have a list price and discount levels that can act as incentives, levers or there are other options for inducement. Otherwise, you give t…

Post by jklm » Wed, Nov 02, 2022, 3:55 PM UTC

reaperducer wrote: post #78

imagine99 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 du…

it's just annoying to the extreme I once had to find software options for a company I worked for. I had a deadline to meet for that, plus my regular duties. That meant that any company that had "Call for pricing" didn't make the cut. I don't have time for that. We ended up spending $120,000 on the solution I chose. I don't know if we could have gotten a better deal from another vendor, because they wanted to play gam…

Post by evanwolf » Wed, Nov 02, 2022, 9:32 PM UTC