It's the only way to run a business.

Everyone has different needs, different existing environments, different service expectations+++

So you can't effectively stick to one price for the "large" tier. Given the differences in complexity and capacity consultants are needed. Startups can't build in-house service teams - the economics are misaligned. Not that you can get away from consultants if you buy from Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, or IBM...

Plus there are issues in terms of pricing and domain expertise across different industries - Federal, Education, Health.. legal issues in what your pricing can be and serious issues around their compliance environment means you need different teams of people to serve different verticals.

If you really need HA you are going to call anyways to negotiate. No one puts 15000 licenses on a credit card.

See my response to sparkling. Part of what enabled Atlassian to get as big as they have is transparent pricing. A customer can always negotiate down from a list price, can always negotiate for additional support during setup and migration. But that transparent pricing establishes a price ceiling that drives a lot of internal discussion and decision over which solution gets the first move in terms of reaching out to sales and getting started with an initial proof-of-concept.

The challenge in building Enterprise SaaS is that you don't know what the right price ceiling is or how to differentiate your customers & products. You need to charge enough to have a business and not too much to scare people away.

Since there aren't that many true enterprises that will allow you to test public prices like you can with consumer and SMB products, you have to go private.

The political dynamics you mention apply to developer pull products but you can easily fix that by calling or sending an email. In many Enterprise cases you want to talk to a VP or CXO for a full deployment and the free and medium offers cover the developer pull demand. If you really don't want to talk to sales AND you can spend $500k+ a year, you're a very rare case.

500K a year on chat is not a very common case

Yes. But one can easily find creative solutions.

Why not communicate using a made-up or real life anonymized case-study? Example: For <n> people organization, with an environment of type <description>, it typically costs <$x> per user. To be really effective give 2, 3 such example scenarios.

Potential customers would be more than happy to extrapolate from this data to start their internal discussions.

> Potential customers would be more than happy to extrapolate from this data

s/extrapolate from/fixate on/.

Seriously, even made up "anchors" for potential enterprise pricing have a tendency to really severely mess up purchase negotiations--for both the vendor (losing them sales when the customer says "it's going to cost four times the example number for a company our size because we need it to integrate with our bespoke, ancient CMS/IAM solution? Hard pass!") and the customer ("this was supposed to be a productivity adder, but since it won't integrate with our bespoke, ancient CMS/IAM solution at a price we can afford, we'll have to train everyone on new processes and duplicate data/access credentials all over the place, making it a time waster and security hole.").

Number of employees and environment type (whatever that means) are not indicative of enough common scenarios in the large-enterprise space to be used to automate pricing decisions.

That's not a statement in favor of opaque pricing or service-provider-highway-robbery; just an observation of the real complexities of big (and often old), unique businesses.

Hiding enterprise pricing is quite common for many SaaS companies.

And yet, Atlassian got as big as they did in large part because of transparent pricing. Because enterprise sales have such a long sales cycle, that transparent pricing gave people inside their enterprises the confidence to push for a product they knew their budget could afford, rather than spend large amounts of internal political capital getting colleagues to rally behind a solution that wasn't affordable for them to begin with. It makes adoption more risky and more difficult.

> And yet, Atlassian got as big as they did in large part because of transparent pricing.

Who knows if that had any influence on their success?

Hmm "everyone" for many "Enterprise" shops the spend on sales team is bigger than on software eng. so one of the reasons Atlassian was always profitable is they didn't have a sales team until they were huge.

This is widely accepted because they did not spend money on an enterprise sales team in their early years, yet saw enterprise adoption.

It is, and when I see that, I almost always move one. First, because if I can't know what the price is, its probably expensive. Second, it usually means one company is getting charged much more than another, and since there is no price, I have no idea if that'll be us.