It's so we can charge people exactly what they're willing to pay instead of creating an average that is a discount for the people willing to spend more and locking out people not able to pay it.

It's also a really good filter for bad customers. Partly because "if you have to ask you can't afford it" and partly because SaaS is sold to execs, not users within the organization. Most people coming to ask about price first are the users that just want something for themselves or a small team, which is not an ideal customer.

Basically if you move on from the site because you can't find the price, that's by design.

"we can charge people exactly what they're willing to pay instead of creating an average that is a discount for the people willing to spend more and locking out people not able to pay it."

The term is 'price discrimination'. [1]

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/price_discrimination.as...

The "reason" is that such companies do all their actual sales closing through individual agents, and their sales strategy is very heavily dependent on price discrimination. Most customers will get "discounts", because the really valuable thing is having your time and contact info to upsell you on stuff you don't need.

Enterprise companies aren't using SEO to source leads. SEO is for quick wins, like signing people up for a trial account, or getting them into the sales funnel, such as with an an 'insdustry research' ebook offer that requires an email signup.

Enterprise companies are established entities that already have good name recognition. They can pay big money to salespeople with deep industry networks, because the deals they make are low-volume, high-value. Once the product is past the point where you have to acquire users at $15/month, it makes sense to upscale to 'enterprise' plans that charge a lot more for things like uptime guarantees and issue escalation.

Since we're throwing around the word 'most' without backing it up, 'most' successful enterprise software companies have transparent pricing.