Re:Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian
by solatic on Thursday July 26, 2018 @05:56PM
(#17621638)
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.
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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.