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.