I read it as: the company doesn't have set pricing but rather has a sales person/department that will charge you more than the next person for the exact same product/service if they have any reason to suspect they can get away with it after learning as much as they can about your finances and only after wasting your time on a high pressure sales pitch.

If someone refuses to openly list prices they're either:

  - Embarrassed by the amount of money they're charging  

  - Aware they charge more than others and don't want to let you comparison shop easily 

  - Planning on setting as high as price as possible depending on how much you can be fleeced into paying

Enterprise SaaS customers are notorious for demanding one-off features, special packages, customizations, or hundreds of hours of meetings. For complicated enterprise products where these requests are inevitable, special pricing is inevitable.

There's a large and very lucrative industry around just implementing SaaS software.

You're right that for purely custom solutions it's understandable, but a base price could often be made public for a lot of products and services that don't offer one. Certainly anyone asking for something special expects to have to negotiate on what that's going to cost them above the standard price.

A base price can only be made public if there exists a base price that would be common among customers - however, if it's not priced as a commodity, that's not the case, there is zero expectation that there should be "the same service" available for the same price, or that there is some base price from which discounts are negotiated or something like that. They want to preserve the ability to have wildly different pricing for different customers, and publishing (or even having internally published) some fixed base price works against that.

If they want to sell their services as custom services, that's the business model - from the beginning they want to make a clear point that this is not a commodity and every deal is a bespoke deal. Even if the technical platform is the same, every business relationship is custom and individually negotiated, with zero expectation that the price you get is in any way related to the prices someone else gets - sometimes that works against you, sometimes that works for you, but that's the business model they've chosen.

It really depends on the nature of the software and the target customer as to whether that makes sense. The spectrum of what "SaaS" is, is just so insanely broad that it's hard to make any sweeping statement here.

> There's a large and very lucrative industry around just implementing SaaS software.

The last decade of my career has been multi-million dollar project after project of just setting up and customizing enterprise SaaS software for a customer's specific need.

We may not like it, but your last point is almost the exact definition of what a "price" is. Things don't have objective "prices" as an intrinsic quality. They don't even have "reasonable" prices intrinsically. A price is no more, and no less than an agreement between buyer and seller to make a transaction happen.

"how much you can be fleeced into paying" while a proactive way to phrase it, is also "What you are willing to pay." Key words - "you are willing". If it's too high, then it isn't a price, as there is no agreement.

Seller wants highest price, and buyer wants lowest.

When it's a commodity, like apples at the store, with many sellers of a basically undifferentiated product, prices average out to something we think of as "fair." But when a product is unique, or there is a monopoly on it, seller has a huge advantage in pricing.

> We may not like it, but your last point is almost the exact definition of what a "price" is. Things don't have objective "prices" as an intrinsic quality. They don't even have "reasonable" prices intrinsically. A price is no more, and no less than an agreement between buyer and seller to make a transaction happen.

The difference is that most companies aren't pricing their goods to the maximum amount they think they can get from you personally. They instead price things according to what the majority of their target market is willing to pay.

You can say that ultimately it still comes down to paying only what you're willing to spend, but I might be willing to spend $20 on something, yet also be unwilling to spend $20 on that same thing if I know you've been charging everybody else $12 for that same product. Consumers find personalized dynamic pricing to be unfair and discriminatory and for good reason.

That's just an extremely cynical way to describe "pricing". There are myriad reasons why a company does not have a fixed set of prices that don't have to do with fleecing anyone, being embarrassed, or trying to hide the fact that they charge more than competitors.

Having worked on pricing strategy, this is not what I've seen as the norm in B2B. If you're talking to an early company that is still working on product market fit, maybe, and definitely if you ask for your own features.

If you're talking to larger companies, thing FAANG, then they have a list price and discount levels that can act as incentives, levers or there are other options for inducement. Otherwise, you give the sales team the authority on go-to-market strategy while they are executing individual deals (tactics). Senior sales leaders can authorize some of those discounts and any special inducements or incentives have to be custom written into contracts by legal + deal desk, making them more time intensive and less desirable.

Sorry how is that at all different than what I said?