Any "Contact sales" stuff has just been an instant "no" at any company I've ever worked at, because that always means that the numbers are always too high to include in the budget unless it's a directive coming down directly from the top.

That’s where directives for enterprise contracts usually come from. I’m sure they won’t even talk to anyone not willing to pay $100k+ per year. Salesforce’s AI Cloud starts at $365k a year.

> I’m sure they won’t even talk to anyone not willing to pay $100k+ per year.

Wouldn't surprise me. We had a vendor whose product we had used at relatively reasonable rates for multiple years suddenly have a pricing model change. It would have seen our cost go from $10k/yr to $100k/yr. As a small nonprofit we tried to engage them in any sort of negotiation but the response was essentially a curt "too bad." Luckily a different vendor with a similar product was more than happy to take our $10k.

A lot of times you can just ask.

We have a model that I see a lot of others do, even if they don't publicize. We have free, OSS, and cheap SaaS tiers fine for many of our academic users, and when a small group really wants the full enterprise version, we generally offer a heavily discounted pricing model to make that affordable too. The only exception here is when it is a true enterprise sale like a shared resource for a large number of users, and we'd still have to think there too.

The reason is it keeps their low budgets and thus their ROI in alignment, which is why this is pretty normal. So again, I'd recommend asking and just clarifying your are a NGO/EDU. No 100% guarantee, but should be common.

It depends. We once were quoted 300K/year by a SaaS company. We replied by saying that our budget is 20K. "Fair enough, we'll take that".

I don't know if that's a smart way to bypass pesky hidden information negotiations and suss out other party's upper bound or a really stupid way to do business...

Their decision makes sense, in a weird way.

A lot of value in some SaaS apps is in the initial investment it took to build it, not in the cost to host a customer's assets.

If the runtime costs of a new customer are negligible, would you rather have 0K or 20K?

Of course, I'd rather have 20K per customer But an initial quote of 300K would likely lead to many instant rejections rather than engaging in negotiation, right? That's why I say it feels like a stupid practice, even though it could pay off really well if some company accepts outright (With the caveat that I've never been near this kind of business deal, so I'm just going off of common sense)

Sure, but some people will accept the 300K so it could be worth it even if you scare off a majority of your potential customers.

If dodgy pricing/sales tactics didn't work then Oracle would be bankrupt instead of a 300 billion dollar company.

It depends on the company. It's kind of like a menu item that says "Market Price". You know it's not going to be cheap. You don't know until you ask if the price is less than the value offered.

It makes it impossible to access for bootstrapping, at least for people who have budget constraints. Which is just reality, it's a scarce resource and I appreciate what they have made available so far inexpensively.

But hopefully it does give a little more motivation to all of the other great work going on with open models to keep trying to catch up.

The jump to enterprise pricing suggests that they have enormous enterprise demand and don’t need to bother with SMB “teams” pricing. I suspect OpenAI is leaving the SMB part up to Microsoft to figure out, since that’s Microsoft’s forte through their enormous partner program.