> no one talks about it on HN because they are not a startup

I think it's simply that a lot more people have used Cloudflare because it has a free plan, whereas Akamai is expensive in comparison.

CloudFlare publishes their pricing. Akamai doesn't.

Dealing with salespeople is a massive PITA. They're not going to tell me anything that's not in the docs or support forums and I don't want to spend a week negotiating. I've seen many others make this point on HN over the years.

Maybe Akamai only focuses on large enterprise customers while CloudFlare also goes for the SMB market. IDK. The HN crowd seems to work at SMBs (startups included) or at companies big enough to operate their own CDN.

Fuck I hate this. I've avoided buying storage servers from ixsystems, despite the fact their products seem to be exactly what we need, because they won't tell me how much they fucking cost. They want to have a "conversation" about "solutions".

Fuck you. Sell me boxes and tell me how much they cost. But they won't.

I work for a vendor and I'm not allowed to tell my clients pricing because I'm not qualified to make deals. We don't even have a list price published internally, it's all at the salesman's discretion. That means some clients pay $150k, some pay $300k, some get it for free bundled with another purchase. Far too often I'm asked "budgetary pricing" but even that is a conversation with a solution architect and a virtual procurement cycle and an NDA and all that nonsense. Just so we can make sure someone is getting overcharged.

I'm going through this right now. I'm sure we are not willing to pay the price but some VP wants a commercial solution not an in-house solution. So I have to get quotes from enterprise vendors and cannot get even ballpark numbers out of them without at least 3 meetings and where they basically try to get our finances (but maybe I'll get some tickets to NBA playoffs or something in a Faustian bargain). I never want to hear "we grow as you grow" or any form of that ever again.

Last project I could have spent that money to pay for 3-4 additional full time engineers for 3 years and built a better solution with open source because I still had to devote 2 plus myself to do integration. And then didn't have overpriced SMS for the next decade and licensing headaches and afford to keep at least 1 of the engineers indefinitely.

Ugh. So many terms that when I actually say out loud and try to be serious I throw up in the back of my mouth a little.

Is there room in this space for a new no-nonsense vendor? Someone who cuts out all the goddamn middlemen and just asks what hardware you want, how you want it configured, and quotes you a frickin price without all the bullshit?

abmx maybe?

First I've heard of them (but I'm not any kind of expert). Are they good? I usually just hear the usual suspects mentioned such as iXSystems and Supermicro. Linux guys will mention one called PogoLinux every once in a while also

I have bought a few servers from them (4 or so over the years), and they have served me pretty well so far. I haven't had to do any RMA's or replacements though, so not sure how good the company is about that.

"Solution Architect" is a nauseating concept.

To be fair, it does represent a concept where I don't know any other word that can take its place.

We sell incredibly complicated systems that necessarily interact with many other complicated systems. We don't work natively with all of them, and sometimes we need to do custom work. Not to mention that we need hardware in many geographical areas, yet still need to work when the virtual space doesn't line up with the physical space.

It's not as easy as "am I buying the small, medium, or large solution". Before you invest tens of millions of dollars into this one product, you need someone from the vendor to analyze your infrastructure and tell you if our product will work, and then how many you need to buy and where you need to put them geographically, and then how many hours of custom programming it will take to get everything working with the other systems.

That's far outside any definition of "salesman" I've ever heard. These people are project architects and their speciality is solution design. It's not a three-tier SaaS solution.

Big HN fans here at iXsystems -- thanks for the feedback!

We'd actually love to be able to give you an "add to cart" price, but the reality is that most of our systems are configured to your specific requirements (with the exception of the FreeNAS Mini, which you can just add to cart on Amazon) instead of just "off the shelf".

It's actually not about trying to figure out how much is in your wallet, I assure you. In fact, we have one of the most transparent pricing processes in the biz. For example, we tell you your end price on our storage systems before a Reseller/VAR is even involved. We also fought the concept of having "list prices" for years, since we all know they're completely fictitious. However, it's something our F500, Gov't, and University customers almost always require so that they can measure and compare their discount.

Nonetheless, we do try to make the design process as quick and painless as possible for you, and regardless of whether or not you give us another shot, the feedback is always appreciated.

Cheers!

iXSystems does have min/max configuration prices on their website for the TrueNAS systems. If they took forever or wanted to get into NDAs for pricing that would be one thing, but if I wanted to specify the exact parts in my servers rather than tell the vendor what I need it to do and have them take care of the rest.. Dell will let me do that without talking to a salesperson, but how in Cthulhu's name am I supposed to pick from the twelve bazillion CPUs Intel is offering?

The way you do this is with an RFQ. Send them a notice of exactly what you want and ask for a quote. Be clear that it is a competitive bid situation and you are going to buy from the lowest bidder.

The problem is if you only need one or two servers that's too small for most vendors to bother responding. If you're buying 10 or more it can work well.

Why do startups that sell to other startups hire sales people to do this instead of just having clear pricing?

Obviously they must extract some value for the business but the experience of haggling with some sales bro to get a decent price leaves me so annoyed with services that I usually skip signing up when it’s the only option.

> Let’s talk about solutions!

No thanks. I just want to insert dollars and get the service.

It's because just having a pricing page doesn't give any feedback as to whether the price is correct or not.

A salesperson could at least ask 'what is a better price we can shoot for?' or 'what features do you really need?' whereas a visitor to a pricing page just disappears.

You can A/B test pricing, Amazon does it all the time. You can have a pricing page that says "If this seems off to you, let us know and we'll talk" like Papertrail does. There are plenty of options, but if you're worried about customers walking away, you're losing tons of them by making them call you first.

Pricing is hard.

Your platform may have 1000's of features, not all of which all your clients want or can pay for. Packaging into simple groups may not possible until you have the volumes to figure out what works

Many clients need specific features that you don't have yet, pricing calculation becomes very complex, and depends on customer to customer as well. We will charge more to some customers simply because we know they need a lot of hand holding and special assistance

I don't run any business so I don't have much info, only questions. Why could you not simply add a "custom solution, contact us here" next to the publicly priced offers? That way everyone is addressed, best of both world.

The simple answer to your question of why B2B startups devote resources to salespeople rather than having a clear (published) pricing strategy is that they don’t know how much their prospective good/service is worth and therefore need an interactive ”price discovery” process to occur. Once that process has occurred, however, they’re left with a dilemma: they sold the same thing to one client for $150k, to another one for $300k, and one got it bundled for free. How on earth can they keep a straight face when they go ahead and publish a single price that will at the very least infuriate two out of three of their early adopters? They’ve trapped themselves until they can offer something radically new and therefore decoupled from prior pricing. And by then the salesperson-centric paradigm may be so engrained into the firm’s behaviour that it is no longer possible to change.

Mainly because it makes boatloads more money than a single cookie cutter option.

I’d pay more money for an option without the endless phone calls and emails, it’s like advertising that you have to listen to.

Multiple cookie cutter options + "call us if you want" works pretty well for Salesforce. Pay-for-what-you-use-until-you're-huge is sufficiently profitable for AWS/google cloud/Azure. The frustration expressed here is against the companies that force prospective users to call them, no matter what.

Having tiered pricing + "Call us if ..." works at a large scale. At small scale, particularly smaller startups in the B2B space, extracting value from each deal matters a lot more as you don't have anywhere near the level of deal flow on your inbound funnel.

Note that B2C is totally different and unless you're doing some very high priced / bespoke delivery then you have to go cookie cutter.

Akamai has been around since web 1.0 and reached critical mass before the freemium model was prevalent. At this point, they sell on reputation. They serve such a ludicrous amount of traffic and I can't recall ever seeing a major outage. I've been in and out of a lot of IT departments and every single one has used Akamai for public-facing systems. And I mean, every one.

You can get Akamai CDN through Azure: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-cdn-from-akamai...

and they publish their pricing, no minimum purchase: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/cdn/

Cloudflare only publishes the prices for their lower tiers, for enterprise it's "Contact Us".

When was the last time Akamai forced you to fill out a CAPTCHA?

This morning, actually.

https://www.akamai.com/us/en/resources/brute-force-attacks.j...

Cloudflare has never made me fill in a captcha.

If you'd like to experience this, just use Tor.

Or open it from China (where the captcha is even blocked). The irony....

So, now we have..... 3 ..... single points of failure ?

I’m clearly missing something, but why doesn’t that solve the problem?

And I’m keeping the scope of my comment on the technical side, and ignoring the business/antitrust potential.

As opposed to further up the stack where you rely on just a small handful of backbones that fail in spectacular ways far more than Cloudflare does. L3 and AT&T and all the networks that just route traffic through China for no reason at all.

As opposed to hosting everything on AWS, so half the Internet goes down when they have a no-so-uncommon outage.

I don’t think Cloudflare is that much of a bottleneck in comparison. Not to mention 3 points of failure is the definition of “not a single point of failure”.

For completeness remember Google's 8.8.4.4

    google-public-dns-a.google.com 8.8.8.8
         IPv6 address 2001:4860:4860::8888

    google-public-dns-b.google.com 8.8.4.4
         IPv6 address 2001:4860:4860::8844

Akamai has 7,500 employees, Cloudflare has 500.