Oh I might add another huge thing: Have a way to justify/explain your pricing and how you came to that number. When you have to "learn about my company" in order to give me pricing info, I know you're just making the price up based on what you think I can pay. That's going to backfire on you because after you send me pricing, I'm going to ask you how you arrived at those numbers. Is it by vCPU? by vRAM? by number of instances? by number of API calls per month? by number of employees? by number of "seats"? If you don't have some objective way of determining the price you want to charge me, you're going to feel really stupid and embarrassed when I drill into the details.

I'm confused by this, why would sales team know in detail the vRAM contribution to sales price, and how is it relevant to your purchase decision? I've never heard of enterprise/SAAS pricing to be based primarily using cost plus pricing.

Some products (especially infrastructure) still bill based on (outdated and often irrelevant) core counts and memory count. A few years ago I talked to a seller of a PDF library/toolkit who wanted to know my production and staging core count before they would quote me a price. Explaining to them that it runs in a serverless function on-demand was fun, especially because they would say things like, "well, what's your average?" I would often reply and say my average is defined by a function where you take the number of active users (which itself is highly elastic) and calculate for average runtime at 4 cores per user for approximately 50 ms per page (which page count is highly elastic too) and sum to get "average core use per month". Needless to say it was like pushing a rope.

More common now with SaaS seems to be employee count or some other poor proxy measurement for usage. I love actual usage based billing, but some of the proxies people pick are ridiculous. Like, if I have 5 seats or 500 employees, but 2 users spend 6 hours a day in the software and then 10 others maybe look at it once a quarter, paying the same for those is absurd and is not usage-based billing at all.

Usage-based pricing makes sense when you’re buying infrastructure products. For (most?) other things, the price is based on value, not material cost.

The cost of that PDF generation might as well round up to zero, but developing the tech cost multiple man-years of work. How do you price that “objectively” unless you’re given a breakdown of the company R&D expenses, operation costs and margins. That is not a reasonable request. Either you’re happy paying $X because it solves your problem and brings equivalent value to your business, or you’re not.

I do agree seat-based pricing is often ridiculous, but that’s a problem for the free market to solve. Alternatives usually pop up given enough demand.

> How do you price that “objectively” unless you’re given a breakdown of the company R&D expenses, operation costs and margins.

You ballpark how long it would take you to build something similar? You don’t need any breakdown for that, just a marginally competent engineer on staff.

Software developers:

> we can't do estimates.

Software developers as soon as estimating something would be beneficial for them.

> all you need is one of us on staff, to do estimates.

You can’t do estimates without specifications, which is what everyone wants. If you have a literal product to estimate, it becomes a lot easier.

I agree that in general usage-based pricing makes the most sense (particularly as that is a good proxy for measuring how much "value" someone is getting from it), my biggest complaint was that the way they were trying to measure it was dumb and very outdated. It really only made sense in a world where everyone was still running on physical servers or VMs. I would certainly concede that pricing is a very hard problem for a product like this, but whatever pricing they come up with should at least map onto the system it's being used in. Basing it off of number of pages of PDFs generated might would make sense, but they insisted on knowing how many CPU cores I would be allocating (which makes little sense when it's deployed as a highly elastic lambda function!)

You sound like the worst possible customer. Don’t you see? Nobody is obligated to serve cheap people.

> You sound like the worst possible customer. Don’t you see? Nobody is obligated to serve cheap people.

No, I don't see, but it's clear from your personal attack that you do see and that you can help me, so thank you in advance. So please, help me to see.

Can you please point out to me where I'm being the "worst possible customer" ? Is it because I refuse to lie and/or make shit up to jam my extremely square peg into their round hole? (which I might add, would open me to legal liability down the road if I guessed wrong (lawsuit for underpaying license fees), or would mean I drastically overpay and even bankrupt the company if I guess way too high. What if I get one customer and use 500ms of a single vCPU all month, but I guessed 50 vCPU?).

If they want to know things that I don't even know in order to price them, what else should I do? I have a theoretical product that doesn't exist yet, with 0 users, 0 vCPUs, and 0 vRAM because it isn't deployed yet. I have no idea if I'll get 10 users in the first year or 10,000,000. How many vCPUs and vRAM should I tell them so they can price it? Keep in mind this will be deployed in an AWS lambda function so it scales literally on-demand, demand that we have no idea of yet because the product doesn't exist. We also have no idea how much CPU and RAM it will even need, because again it doesn't exist so it can't be profiled or measured. If you can't answer that, I won't accuse you of being "the worst possible customer" ;-)

Maybe a different approach. I have a PDF library that I want to sell you. I typically charge $10,000 per vCPU per month. You are thinking about building a product on top of my library and ask me for pricing (which I don't publish anywhere so you have absolutely no idea what to expect). You have no idea how many users (if any) you'll have, and you plan to deploy this as a lambda function that can scale from 0 to Infinity almost on-demand. I ask you how many vCPU per month you're going to use so I can quote you a price. What is your answer?

Salespeople often misunderstand value-based pricing. If a product costing V dollars is made of N parts, then each part provider claims their value is V, so they deserve V-$1.

A PDF conversion may be required for the end-users, but it doesn’t make the entirety of the value of the product. It just doubles it, as well as the N features before that. But although each feature doubles the value of the product, the order of features doesn’t matter; A PDF export might have been added as the second feature, but the 10th feature still doubled it.

It's uncanny how accurately this maps to departments claiming they contribute V-$1 of the total profits. Sales argues they bring all the money, engineering argues sales would have nothing to sell without the products being made, platform claims no products would run without the infra they provide, support claims everything would grind to a halt without their constant babysitting of the users, etc etc. Only HR and Facilities don't claim to be directly responsible for any revenue, but that's only because everyone needs them anyway.

Well, it's all true. Without one of these, there would be no V.

I spend a lot of time on pricing and packaging of SaaS software and the challenge is real. Everybody says they want simple pricing, which often aligns to seats or MAU - but then they want usage-based pricing, but then they're concerned about unpredictable costs and spiky usage.

Unfortunately, there's no such thing as a free lunch - you can have simple and predictable but you will have some users that you pay for that aren't getting value. You can have usage-based billing, but then you run the risk that anyone who uses an antipattern for the product will suddenly cost you a ton (or consume all of their allocated quota and be dead in the water, which is differently bad).

The more flexibility you offer, the more complexity you're putting onto customers and sales teams to understand what's the best way for them to consume the software.

There's also a lot of market pressure to "follow the crowd" - even if you have an option that is (in your mind) more customer friendly/favorable, if you are structuring your pricing differently than the competition, there will be customers who are concerned that they're not getting "a good deal" or concerned that the structure will end up being less favorable to them over time (after all, why does everybody ELSE do it this other way?). Sales reps also prefer pricing strategies that are at least structurally consistent with other products on the market, because it makes their lives easier.

Similarly, it's very difficult to change pricing nad packaging later on - changing price is relatively simple, but changing units of billing or retiring an old offering can be an extremely difficult task.

(disclaimer: these are just my own opinions, everything is hard)

I've seen companies square this circle with capped hybrid billing strategies. Customer gets charged the min of bills. Bureaucratic customers that need specific billing models can pick them but most people will accept the savings.

It's funny, this was actually one scenario that I thought about mentioning but I had to get on a plane and was running out of time.

It is true you CAN do this, but very few do, for a few reasons:

One is, it's bad for margins - when you build a pricing model, you inevitably end up creating a system where some customers subsidize other customers. You assume each user or unit of usage is going to cost you X/unit and you charge X+Y. There is inevitably going to be a distribution of users and their usage patterns and costs, and the 90% percentile is probably going to be 5X, and the 10% is probably going to be .2X. There's not any malice there, it's just that different users have different usage scenarios and they use the product differently.

Another reason relates to the issues with usage-based billing. Even in that scenario, whatever usage dimension you measure on will have users that don't fit the profile and they still end up being subsidized (from a margins perspective) by customers that DO map to the profile. A really naive example - you're a database company, you want to be cheap for people to get started, you go with usage based billing and charge based on storage. For most customers, that works - assuming your product value is apparent and differentiated, I think most people would understand that "I have to pay more because I'm storing more data, and accessing that data can be more expensive, queries more complex, and the utiltiy that I get from the database scales as the quantity of storage increases". Great, usage based billing, let's do it.

But - then you have users who store very small amounts of data but with incredibly high query volumes. Your options are to either just eat the cost of those users (which might be fine for some amount of time) or now start to add additional dimensions on which you meter usage. So now you charge for storage AND cpu time AND maybe concurrent connections if that's a problem AND bandwidth. Congratulations, you have now created the perfect usage-based billing model, which perfectly assigns customer charges to handle the multitude of usage patterns that customers experience.

BUT, it's really complicated to explain to people, and it's really complex to predict costs. That has two implications, one of which is that your value proposition has to be increasingly compelling as complexity increases. To use the database example, at some point someone at a customer will say "honestly, wouldn't it be more predictable if we just spun up a couple of VMs and ran a database instance ourselves?". Complex usage-based pricing works if you've got incredible technology that would be difficult to impossible for a customer to deploy themselves, but if your value prop is convenience and/or abstraction, you're diminishing that value as you make the pricing model increasingly less convenient and less abstract.

The other factor is that someone has to build and manage the metering of all of these things. Even a single dimension like storage is complicated - how do I bill for additional storage? Do I look at the total storage at the end of the month and multiply by X? That hurts users who, say, run end of month batch jobs - but for you, users that use huge amounts of temporary space and then free them before the end of the month, that hits your bottom line (depending on your own architecture). So maybe you want to charge on a daily basis, but now every problem gets more complicated.

Then, if you extend that across multiple billing dimensions, it's just gotten harder and more complicated. Now it's rock and a hard place time - you can stick to one abstract usage measure that is easy to reason about, but you're inevitably going to have some users that underpay based on that usage measure and some that overpay. Or you can add more dimensions and make things more "fair", but everybody's lives are harder, both for the customer and for you and your team.

When you give customers automatic optimization, you get the worst of both worlds - you make less money on the bottom 10% (usage-wise) of users/customers because they end up falling into the usage based billing, and you make less money on the top 10% because there is capped upside for you as the provider. For customers, sure, it saves them money, but what you're really giving them is a price cap (not to exceed X).

I would say for the sales teams, it's also not great, because they have all of the challenges of explaining two different models. For enterprises, it's a mess because 1) they'll probably want to negotiate specific billing terms for their use cases (we don't want to pay X for bandwidth, we want to pay Y) and other structural terms, all of which your billing system needs to support.

At the end of the day, however you charge for anything is an abstraction layer on top of your costs. That's true if you charge per user, or per object, or per gig, or per connection, or whatever else. It's all unit-based pricing even if it's not usage-based procing. You have to decide how much work you want your engineers, customers, salespeople, etc. to do in order to build, explain, and understand how much someone will pay for software.

My general advice is to pick the simplest pricing model that protects your margins and prevents abuse. For infrastructure-y products, things like storage, compute, network, are all reasonable meters. For SaaS products for business users, per-user pricing is well-understood, and there are things you can do if you really want to apply a usage-based element there (bill based on MAU, or have a MAU component separate from seats purchased). But there's really only two scenarios - you pick a small number of meters and understand that some customers will subsidize other customers, or you meter across a bunch of dimensions that align to your costs and create a lot of complexity for your customers. Blending the two gives you worse margins and the complexity of both options combined.

Yes, it's worse for margins. However, we're in a thread about how potential customers don't want to risk either spending lots of money for services they won't use or dealing with spikes. Not choosing one or the other inherently puts the cost on the provider, shrinking margins.

I don't think it's an especially hard model to understand though. It's commonly called pay-as-you-go in consumer mobile plans and sold as the cheapest option to customers that may not even speak the language the fine print is written in. Those consumers still understand the service they're getting.

Telecom is actually a good example of how granular billing can get, but still produces an incredible profit margin even with simple pricing strategies.

Sure, it’s also very easy to understand paying for deli cold cuts by the pound, but it doesn’t make it a good comparison.

Consumer telecom is a great example of a very constrained problem space. There’s two levers, call time and data. And the population of people who are consuming that are limited to the size of the family.

By contrast, enterprise telecom is incredibly complicated, with variable pricing by region, by time, type of inbound number, and then the software that sits atop that telecom is an additional license.

Telecom is also largely a commodity - one provider is the same as the other. SaaS providers are fundamentally trying to not be commodities, and so the comparison is weak at best.

Consumer telecom is simple because providers have chosen to simplify the pricing strategy, not because they don't have other billing metrics available. You aren't required to have a complicated pricing structure even for incredibly complicated services. Doing so is a deliberate product choice with consequences.

They're also not truly fungible, though that's mostly for the higher end of the consumer market. Think about TMobile's "uncarrier" marketing, or Verizon's network coverage marketing.

And they have high enough volume to average out the outliers.

Did you know that in New Zealand, some business/server telecoms offer different plans based on how much of your traffic goes overseas? It's connected to the rest of the world with, like, five really long and expensive underwater cables, but it's also a not-quite-tiny market itself and if you can serve customers in NZ from a server in NZ, you can avoid expensive routing. (Your customers will also appreciate having a ping time lower than 300ms, even if they don't know what ping time is)

Meanwhile, ISPs in Europe don't charge you extra based on how much traffic you send to New Zealand, because you could max out your 1Gbps flat rate with NZ-bound traffic and it would still be a tiny percentage of all their traffic anyway.

Didn't know about NZ, but it doesn't surprise me. Seems like we mostly agree.

Another fun trap I've seen on the enterprise side is that pinging different towers can have different charges. Highest I've seen was $15 per ping.

I think now we're just arguing semantics. The only billing metrics for cell phones that are visible to the user are usage in minutes and data. This is the easiest type of metric to understand and meter - because it's pure aggregation, and you have a fixed window over which you count the number of bytes or minutes consumed. Compare that to technology metrics like storage consumed, query executions, etc. where the variability in units and behaviors can be massive.

What would be other metrics that you could bill consumers for that they could do anything about?

> You aren't required to have a complicated pricing structure even for incredibly complicated services. Doing so is a deliberate product choice with consequences.

You're making my point - the simpler you make it, and the more abstractions you put, the more decoupled each billed object is from the underlying costs. The implications of that are that you have to be careful about making sure that the economics work out, and that means either you have some customers subsidize others or you are very confident that customers can't use your product in such a way that it turns your numbers upside down. At the same time, that abstraction that you choose will not map to how every customer wants to buy.

To go back to several posts ago, "per user" pricing is a per-unit abstraction that lots of customers like and understand. Sure, customers recognize that some users will use more than others, but it's a deliberate product choice that you abstract the more complicated dimensions from the users.

It sounded like YOU, as a buyer, want a DIFFERENT abstraction, which is "usage" - and again, that's reasonable, but as a product team have to make exactly the same calculus, which is "what metric do we use instead as a proxy?", with the understanding that there are lots of SaaS products where usage patterns are highly variable and it is difficult to come up with single units that cover your bases without making the per-unit price higher than it might otherwise be.

It's not hard to imagine yet another buyer who says (assuming the product metric chosen was "storage consumed"), "wait, I like usage billing, but your per-GB cost is really high for us, because we store a lot of data, but we don't access most of it - why can't you just charge me for data accessed?". You either say no or add more billing dimensions.

> They're also not truly fungible, though that's mostly for the higher end of the consumer market. Think about TMobile's "uncarrier" marketing, or Verizon's network coverage marketing.

It's interesting, because that ALSO proves the point, because the only differentiation you are citing are things other than what customers are being metered for. There's availability differences, but that's orthogonal to the billing metric. If I have connectivity, my minute on tmobile is the same as my minute on verizon is the same as my minute on mint, and the differentiation is everything OTHER THAN the billed minute.

To wrap up - I don't disagree with you that there are benefits to usage-based billing. The point that I am making is that for essentially any SaaS product that has any depth, it can be difficult to pick a single metric at an attractive price point that a) covers your margins across the spectrum of usage behaviors, and b) maps to the metric that the vast majority of your users want. If you try to make everybody happy, you either lose the simplicity or you hurt your underlying margins while simultaneously making everybody's lives harder.

What you described is likely usage-based, in the sense that the (presumably cloud) vendor usually has to reserve a certain amount of resources per user, “just in case”, because they don’t know / can’t predict your activity pattern. Same reason VMs are still charged for when started but idle: they reserve their CPUs.

What people really want, when they say “usage-based billing”, is outcome-based billing. They want to get charged money whenever they hit the button in your software that makes them money (or, for a cost-center, saves them money.)

Think of e.g. tax prep companies. (For the average Joe employee), they don’t charge you money up-front; instead, they take a part of the net-positive return they fully expect to find you. They make you happy, then take a slice of your happiness at the exact point that they’re making you happy. Outcome-based billing.

Yes. There’s nothing more obnoxious to me than products like Figma where my company has a limited number of full licenses. They are super stingy with what my account type can do, so the 2 times per year when I need to get involved inside a Figma document or even a FigJam board I have to go begging for someone else’s license, but it would be way too costly to pay as much per seat for the entire company as we pay for our designers, for whom that’s obviously a core tool.

Isn't that exactly how a lot of things are priced? Ie. Snowflake. Pay for compute, pay for storage, etc.

Some things are sure. But not most. You wouldn't expect to go to McDonald's and they tell you (or even know) how much the fertilizer to grow the corn that feed the pigs that made the bacon contributed to the price you pay for a burger

If McDonald's insisted on having a long sales phone call to sell me a burger, then yeah, I'd expect them to be able to provide me that information.

Really? That means you basically want to know what profit margins they’re running at… which no business would want to (or should need to) reveal

That's exactly what's happening to you when you're the prospective buyer in one of those calls.

I'm not in sales, but I've had a job once where I could see all the financials. And we would very often be charging one customer 10x what we charged another for exactly the same tier of service. Sometimes the huge corps would be paying more for a lower service tier than a small corp on a higher tier.

You can find that information in quarterly published information for all publicly traded companies, and for many non-public companies with only slightly more searching.

But McDonalds absolutely can tell you an objective measure of what they charge you based on what you're getting. They charge you x per burger and y per fries and ...

The examples contained CPU and ram but that's not what they say everything should be - just some objective measure.

Snowflake charge by time, storage and size of machine - though they never tell you what the machine actually is underneath. I don't know what their "large" is.

Maybe it's by concurrent users, maybe amount of hours of support, maybe API calls.

I think the key thing was "we'd charge you X because you'd use Y" rather than "we'd charge you X because you look like you might pay it"

Yes especially enterprise software marketed toward platforms/infrastructure usually are priced this way. SaaS products aimed at consumers or high-level business (like HR, Accounting, etc) often don't, so depending on what people's experience is mostly they may think differently

>When you have to "learn about my company" in order to give me pricing info, I know you're just making the price up based on what you think I can pay.

That is how 99% of sellers do business. The upper end of the price range is what the buyer can pay, the lower end is what their competitors are asking for. Some sellers are lucky to have few competitors, so they can waste more of the buyers' time trying to narrow down exactly how much they can or are willing to pay.

Which is why you shouldn't engage with those sellers and companies they represent unless you have no alternative and are truly desperate.

This is how a lot of consumer businesses are pricing now.

Then they use the same consulting firm as their competitors to set prices.

It’s how any sensible business sets prices. Your cost sets a floor, that’s all. You set the price at whatever level makes the most money.

Many prices end up being a little higher than costs, but that’s because competition drives prices down close to the floor, not because businesses set out to do that.

Why do grocery stores have coupons? It’s not because they’re charitable. It’s because coupons are a way to charge higher prices to people more willing to pay. Trying to figure out your customer’s willingness to pay and matching that with your price is nothing new or unusual. The tactics just change when the purchase is big enough to have dedicated salespeople.

That is actually price fixing and illegal. Not that in the current regulatory environment that there's likely to be enforcement.

So the college model.

>you're just making the price up based on what you think I can pay

It should be based on the email address used. If, for example, your email ends in @google.com, you get charged more. If it ends in @aol.com, then they take pity on you and you get a discount.

My co-worker's grandfather owned a TV repair business. The price was entirely based on the appearance of the person and had nothing to do with the actual problem. This way rich people subsidize the repairs of poor people.

> This way rich people subsidize the repairs of poor people.

tbh I have no problem with this as long as the work was done well.

More like the people who appear rich subsidize the repairs of the people who appear poor. Probably usually fairly accurate but it's amusing to think about the edge cases where the truly rich don't feel the need to dress wealthy anymore and get their TV repaired for cheap.

One of the big benefits of wealth is that everything costs less. This is just an extension of that.

Don't want to be a hater but the parent of my previous post was literally about charging more for rich people. That is the entire point of enterprise plans too.

Wealthy people usually spend more---just because they are less price sensitive and care more about other metrics.

I'm not sure how everything 'costs less'?

You could say that wealthy people can substitute money for time. So they need to spend less eg working hours for each good consumed.

I think he's getting at the pair of boots theory.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory

That. You can spend money to save money in the long run. Just buy the house instead of having to pay for mortgage. Invest it so that it’s generating money while you do nothing. Many things only accessible if you already have money.

> You can spend money to save money in the long run. Just buy the house instead of having to pay for mortgage. Invest it so that it’s generating money while you do nothing.

It's all about opportunity costs.

If the interest on your mortgage pays less than you can get in eg the stock market, you are better off not paying your mortgage. (Ignoring fees and taxes for a moment.)

Poor people often can't even make this decision because they can't afford to do either.

Yes, that theory was never very convincing to me. I grew up on welfare and now make software developer money. I can tell you that I definitely spend more on shoes now, even if they last longer.

Yes, a rich person and a poor person could try to buy the same items and the rich person might be able to buy them cheaper. But: first, when you have more money you generally want to buy nicer stuff, and the bang-for-buck generally goes down. Nicer shoes might cost twice as much, but they are perhaps twenty percent better. (And that's worth it for well-off people!)

Second, you can save a lot of money if you are willing to invest some time. From DIY or just generally shopping around. But: rich people's time is more expensive, even if just by opportunity costs.

From the Wikipedia article:

> In June 2024, the National Bureau of Economic Research from USA published a working paper expanding on the ONS findings, showing that cheapflation, a term the authors coined, is a global phenomenon:[21] "prices of cheaper goods increased at a faster rate than those of more expensive varieties of the same product",[22] thus placing a higher financial burden on poor people.

Funny enough, this observation is perfectly compatible with the notion that everyone, including poorer people, got richer over time as the economy grew, and so the cheapest and nastiest goods were removed from the market. The cheapest most basic TV you can buy today is miles better than what you could buy in the 1970s for example.

> But: first, when you have more money you generally want to buy nicer stuff, and the bang-for-buck generally goes down.

This isn't necessarily a fact of human nature, this is just an extension of Greed.

There is an inflection point, where the price of a good is minimized whereas it's quality and lifespan is maximized. Such an inflection point is somewhat high - meaning it cannot be reached by poor people.

Sometimes people cannot be satisfied, and they will go well past the inflection point. Such behavior is, of course, completely optional and almost always self-destructive.

Sure, a Birkin might be pretty, but really any decently made leather bag will run circles around what you can find at Target. The Birkin isn't bought for quality.

> There is an inflection point, where the price of a good is minimized whereas it's quality and lifespan is maximized. Such an inflection point is somewhat high - meaning it cannot be reached by poor people.

You say that as if it's universally true of all goods.

Btw, finance is one way to transform cap-ex into op-ex. That's why we have mortgages and you can rent things.

> Sure, a Birkin might be pretty, but really any decently made leather bag will run circles around what you can find at Target. The Birkin isn't bought for quality.

That's why you don't buy a leather bag when you are poor and have your wits about you. Leather is expensive. Not just absolutely, but also per use of your bag.

I wouldn't go as far to say "everything costs less" but it is pretty well that established that poverty is very expensive.

A couple of key examples:

Food deserts often mean that groceries are more expensive in poorer areas as opposed to neighboring rich ones. Additionally, bulk food is cheaper but requires having enough funds to buy more than your immediate needs.

It is generally cheaper to own your own home than to rent and low income people are going to pay higher interest on the same home loan.

It is always cheaper for rich people to borrow money than poor people and poor people are often forced into debt in situations where rich people can dip into savings. Having to pay interest on your rainy day debt is way more expensive than getting paid interest on your rainy day savings.

That last one is huge, and tends to compound across all kinds of other areas, increasing the effective price that poor people pay for almost everything.

In the most general sense, it is often feasible to spend more money up front to save money down the road. The amount of interest poor people have to pay to do this reduces or even totally wipes out any savings.

This is all pretty well documented and studied. It's part of the unfortunate feedback cycle at the bottom of the economic bracket that makes climbing back out harder the poorer you get.

Well said. Time is really the wealth, and those with less money have to give up more of their time figuring out things. Wealth buys time, and time of others, to help the time of the payer.

Or they just value things that can make or save them money more.

Yes, but no one prohibits poor people from changing their values.

I know at least one millionaire who seem to own maximum one pair of pants that doesn't have holes in it. Especially in tech, it can be hard to tell. The one conversation I had with a FAANG CEO, he was wearing athletic clothes, as if he'd ducked into the office during a run.

You don't care how much money they have, but how much they'll spend on your product. If they won't spend much on pants, they probably won't spend much on your product, either.

It's not a good indicator that they won't spend money either. These people have a different idea of what's worthwhile, and often times indicating status through clothing is not something they see a ton of signal in.

I'm not rich but I make software money and I can attest to this. I follow a personal finance guru named Ramit Sethi and his motto is to cut costs on things that don't bring you joy in life so you can spend extravagantly on the things that do bring you joy. This applies to all people, not just rich people, though obviously the scale is different for people with higher income/net worths.

For me, I don't see a need to spend a lot of money on clothes because I work at home without video. But I will spend on luxury vacations and dinners, and I will certainly spend money on services that can help save me time at home/work.

According to "The Millionaire Next Door", this is actually a surprisingly common "edge case". The "rich" are the people who diligently save and invest, get their hands dirty at what they do, and don't care about pretenses -- they'll drive a beat-up pickup truck because it helps them at their work, and they can take it out for fishing and hunting, and they can have it paid off -- while that pretty Porsche is going to just sit in a driveway and rust, because it's too nice to take it for a run doing the things you want to do!

Whereas the "high income" people -- typically doctors and lawyers -- are spending lots of money on nice suits and cars and homes, but have little to show for it in terms of actual wealth.

Having said that, I don't mind the rich who aren't pretentious getting a discount. I'd call it a "pretention tax". What's further ironic is that the former tend to appreciate paying a little extra if it ensures that a job is well-done, whereas the latter tend to skimp on paying extra, and often get the poor-quality results you'd expect.

And yes, there's exceptions to both categories, too -- indeed, it's not as if it's hard to live within your means as a doctor or a lawyer, if you don't mind looking a little "lower class" as a result (and if your clientele are the working class, this may even be a bonus!). But it's nonetheless a fascinating dynamic to keep in mind!

Correct. Market value is not the cost of making X plus a margin. Many people get that wrong.

Marker value is what someone else is willing to pay.

If I remember correctly, Amtrak does something like this for pricing their train tickets. It is not the cost of going from A to B. It is priced so the more populated area travelers, North East Coast, pay higher to help reduce the cost for those in the middle of the USA. This helps make tickets more adorable for the more poor individuals.

> make train tickets more adorable

amtrak uwu

I've always wondered about this. My wife always tells me to close the garage when folks come to the house to give us bids on jobs so they don't see the cars. Not that a Tesla indicates wealth but I guess it indicates something? I tell her she's paranoid... maybe she's not.

I think your wife is right. I have a tesla and I always think about that indicating something. Also Tesla's are so ubiquitous it doesn't matter that much like it used to be, and you can get a used one for pretty cheap. But that rich guy reputation still persists.

And then now that we have Elon Musk following the Howard Hughes self destructive cycle (greatest video game player AND ceo of 5 companies who posts all day on social media), there's a very possible negative takeaway - especially in tech it's hard to know. I live in a ridiculous world, I actually see 'got mine before elon was a doofus' bumper stickers. We should all try to judge each other on actual behavior and choices. I'm an asshole completely separate from buying a tesla a decade ago, people.

Henry Ford was a real piece of work for a good while. I'm not sure how much it would have affected his sales--not that he was selling to the upper end of the market.

I live in a California 'burb and with all the tax credits, you really do see Teslas everywhere. You could be driving through a run down neighborhood and you could still see a Tesla around.

I'm not quite understanding the point you're trying to make about the bumper stickers though. I think Elon's actual behavior and choices are what causing people to have these bumper stickers.

You know it might be also priced on “this guy feels like a pain to work with after the way he asks questions, let’s put the price up”. There is no way to objectively explain that without having person offended - so I am going to put a price I think will cover me dealing with BS questions or attitude of the customer and if he walks it is still a good deal for me.

We might think that companies need every single sale - well no sometimes you want to fire a customer or not take one on.

You don't have to change you process, so you can still explain it rationally.

Just leave off the "then I multiplied by 10" part.

Which I did by accident once ( not by 10, but it was still substantial )... but it turned out the customer was delighted because we were still 50% vs their existing vendor.

Enterprise pricing is a farce.

I very much agree with the poster above about vendors disqualifying themselves.. another red flag for me is the Two Suits and Skirt pre-sales Hydra Monster that big vendors love to send around, to scare you into letting them capture all the value that their purporting to provide you.

And yes, the above shows I've been both sides of the fence. I felt it was going to be good experience, and it was, but I have regrets too.

The price is set by the market. It never was and never will relate to the seats/resources used/etc.

The price is set by the market as a function of some sellers charging by seats, others by resources used, etc, and some buyers preferring simple pricing models, others preferring usage-based, etc.

>just making the price up based on what you think I can pay

It's called supply and demand, and it's the way things have been priced since the dawn of commerce. The only time the price is based on cost is when the market is competitive enough to drive that price down, and the cost acts as the floor. Even then, if you can get your costs below those of your competitors then it's your competitors cost that can act as the floor.

The way things should be priced is based on the value it gives you. If your service makes me or saves me $100 of value per month, I should be prepared to pay up to a little below $100 for it.

No it's not called supply and demand, it's called price discrimination. The way things should be priced is based on the value it gives the market as a whole. Anything further is an anti-competitive attempt to vacuum up more of the buyer surplus.

Price discrimination is the practice of charging different amounts to different people, according to what they're willing to pay. It's a more efficient approach than just setting a single price that clears the market. It sounds underhand, but most people like it in practice: it's the basis of most discounts and coupons.

Why?

I disagree, but genuinely asking why you think that. Why is it ok if it's on the market level but not on the individual level? Price discrimination is all around us all the time, often "hidden" because people get uncomfortable with it, but I don't see it as a bad thing (and it's often very net positive socially).

> It's called supply and demand

Supply of the kinds of services under discussion here is rarely limited in any practical sense, so scarcity does not play.

> The way things should be priced is based on the value it gives you. If your service makes me or saves me $100 of value per month, I should be prepared to pay up to a little below $100 for it.

This ignores opportunity cost. Very few buyers have infinite cash, they do tend to have infinite ways they could spend money though and many of them will give a far better return than a couple of percent.

In reality if you're adjusting your pricing to try and extract the most you think you can get away with from the customer, you will lose a substantial number of buyers - and probably more so with buyers who have a technical mindset.

And also, the customer has the money and gets to make a choice. Sure, supply and demand is a real thing. But there is also a notion of friction blocking the sale. Everyone absolutely hates considering a new purchase that doesn't give you clarity on details and price.

So that CTO says I'm probably not going to bother with you if you don't have a clear price. I also practice this purchasing way. Everyone should. So sure, someone in sales will fight to the death to justify their strategy of obfuscation and charging what the market will bear, and to try to justify their presence in the sales process with some kind of commission and argument about how they caused pain for the buyers and got more money. Meanwhile, company B sold me a widget for whatever, I already paid them, there was no salesperson wasting time on either side.

As a corporate executive, buying things for good prices is a substantial part of your job. You're not some grandma looking for a movie to watch who will bail if she can't figure out how much it costs. Sure, you can refuse to buy things altogether, but it won't be very good for your company - these kinds of companies seem to have been broadly outcompeted by ones that do buy things.

Sure, but as a corporate executive you also have a limited amount of time. If you invest all of your time on inefficient sales processes then you may only get to consider one or two or three providers. If instead you eliminate the ones that have bad signs (like heavy price obfuscation) you can instead focus on the vendors that don't do those things. In the end you might not get the best product and/or the best price, but the same is also true if you waste all your time jumping through sales hoops and aren't able to examine more players.

If jumping the hoops guaranteed the best price, then I would agree with you, but I would vehemently disagree that it does.

What you're saying is akin to someone entering a clothes shop and the store clerk asking what they work on, to gauge the T-shirt prices according to the client's salary.

No, it's setting a price and seeing how many people will pay that price, varying it and see who will pay that. You can derive a demand curve and work out the best price to maximise your revenue. And you can do even better if you can do some price discrimination, so you can sell some to people who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford it, which still charging other more. This isn't judging someone's salary before quoting a price, it's things like charging different prices in different markets, or offering student or senior discounts, or coupons etc.

is that how you present the price to your own customers? or do you operate on value based pricing?

I've always agreed with this take but now as a B2B founder doing sales, I think it can honestly be interpreted a lot more charitably.

I get on an initial discovery call to learn a few things, like:

* How much will it cost us to support you based on what you're using our platform for?

* How expensive is this problem for you today?

* From there, how much money could we save you?

My goal is to ensure a (very) positive ROI for the lead, and that we can service them profitably. That's how I put pricing together. It seems pretty reasonable.

Our platform is also rather extensible, and I want to make sure that they'll understand how to use it and what it's for, instead of becoming an unhappy customer or wasting their own time.

You're c-suite and you negotiate based on time and materials vs ROI?

Love it, I'm the same.

Break the solution selling sales cycle.

Non-technical sales people selling software need a better standard to deliver on the promises of their software.

We want partners, not vendors. This can be communicated long before reaching out.

I was just thinking about this today. Basically replacing my price list or prefacing it with something like : "We've designed the pricing and services to be affordable by bootstrapped startups with just one investing founder. Additionally prices are comparable to a FT SWE on a quarterly basis."

Because the truth is that the contracts are almost always different, so while price tables are good to get an idea, words are just better at conveying the ballpark, and they lack the illusion of price rigidness.

I wanted to hire a personal trainer who just couldnt coordinate a call with me and I asked him to send me the details per mail. They said they dont do emails so didnt choose them as it was to scammy for me

They don't do emails? What are they, illiterate?

i think so xD

Quite possibly.

Going to add the most important thing: It is perfectly fine to end calls early if it feels like it has phased itself out. Don't be afraid to do so! Everyone on the call is costing someone else a lot of income. This goes for internal or external calls.

Yes, seriously. When a sales call is scheduled 30 minutes but 5 minutes in we have a conclusion, you get a lot of good will points from me if you thank me for my time, ask me if there's any other questions I have, and then conclude the call. You can even make this explicit with a quip like, "I'll give everybody 20 minutes back!" then it's clear you are being courteous with our time.

Some people dont know when to end calls early and everyone else is too polite to tell them to end it. I had a manager who made it a point to suggest to end a call early. I try not to force calls to end early unless I know everyone on the call. I notice when its all devs its really easy to suggest ending early vs when non devs are on a call unless a dev manager does it.

For #2, someone once said there are two pricing models (was it Joel Spolsky? Don't recall..):

$0 - $999 - direct sale/download, pricing on website

$50,000+ - full sales team, no pricing on website

And essentially not much in between... this has perhaps changed a bit with SaaS, but this is still semi true.

Oh yes it was Joel Spolsky: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/11/18/price-as-signal/

That's like a restaurant, with no prices on the menu.

"If you have to ask..."

I would definitely like to never have to talk to another "people person," and no-calls-but-we'll-give-you-the-info-you-need policy sounds great.

You mean a restaurant that gets away with serving mediocre food for ridiculous prices, because the "no prices on the menu" gimmick generates enough status/prestige to compensate for any customer dissatisfaction? I.e. the restaurant equivalent of being famous for being famous.

Wouldn't know. I generally avoid those joints.

My tastes are a lot more plebeian.

Unfortunately, I have to eat in one, every now and then, but I always walk away disappointed.

I think you mean this link: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...

Indeed.

Given that I am the original russian translator of this article, shame on me for not remembering exactly which article it was.

I don’t think this is true anymore. Firebase, auth0, AWS, figma and many more SaaS obliterated this dichotomy

I'm a freelancer and sometimes I have to recommend software or services for my clients.

When I evaluate choices I automatically remove all of those that don't have pricing up front as I have no time nor intention to do this. I don't think any company lost millions on me, but many lost tens of thousands.

API providers are the worst, but I kinda understand them.

Are you me? I'm a CTO too, and I feel _exactly_ like this.

TLDR; please don't call him, he really doesn't like calls. Must be a gen z

your probably leaving money on the table then

i’d find that unacceptable as a ceo

you got to do the work to do what’s best for the company, not yourself

No, they're protecting money on their company's table from being taken by random sellers. "Let's get on a call" game seldom leads to better deals for the buyer.

I see it like this. If the seller can have salespeople waiting on a call, there can be better deals somewhere else. If the seller can have people cold-calling other companies, there most certainly is a better deal around that they don't want me to know about.

Over the years I have developed a salescall aversion to the grade that I hang up as soon as I my unconciousness have detected one. It has gone so far that I have had to apologize to our salespeople calling me and I just hang up by reflex. Very awkward I tell you.

Who knows, maybe there is no better deal, maybe the cold-calling salesman is actually offering the very best deal there is on the market. Then again, maybe the Nigerian prince really needs help with their fortune, and I really just won a car for being the millionth visitor on that news site[0].

Point being, some stranger is calling me and asking for my money. I don't know enough about them to give them money just because they say it's going to be worth it.

--

[0] - https://xkcd.com/570/

But part of doing what's right is considering opportunity cost.

If buying something would be a win for an org takes up too much organizational bandwidth because of how hard it is to procure, then it's not worth fiddling about trying to buy it.

The org gains a whole bunch of time he's not wasting on useless calls.

when your purchasing 100k+ products having a conversation makes a lot of sense

lots of opportunities to find easy win-win

finding out what the salesmen incentives are and working with them can lead to a good outcome

obviously not worth it for smaller ticket stuff

There's a bazillion things we could be thinking about buying.

Being able to serve yourself and figure out if there's any fit removes friction. Spending an hour on an initial sales call to find out that information isn't optimal.

As he's said, when he's desperate, he will do more work. And he is willing to do calls when it makes sense, but expects them to be efficient and expects to be able to qualify the vendor.

CTO's time is worth ~$10k a day, spending a day "on calls" to save $2.50 is unacceptable.

I’d extend that to sales calls where they try to get you to bend your requirements to fit the mis-aligned product.

>2. Know that the pricing is within the ballpark of reasonable given what your product does.

My goto line is "I can get a ballpark estimate for chucking 22 metric tons into low earth orbit, why can't I get a ballpark estimate for your boring enterprise software library licensing?" Links to SpaceX pricing help here.

Agreed. As someone in a place to make purchasing decisions, if I can just sign up and try something without having to "jump on a call" and sit through a demo, I'm more likely to do so. I'm more willing to meet afterwards if I like what I see.

As it happens, a while back I did exactly this for a company after reading a post about their launch on HN. In a later conversation with their CEO, I found out we were their first customer!

You can go to the SpaceX website and see the price of rockets. You can literally enter your credit card numbers to pay for it.

I'd wait to see if they have a good black friday sale.

you mean... the gift shop with the model rockets?

No, go to https://rideshare.spacex.com/search?orbitClassification=2&la... and click through a couple of times. It literally asks you for your contact data and credit card number so you can pay 650k USD for launching 15 kg to LEO.

Technically you’re just paying the $5,000 deposit with your card. They probably don’t want to eat the card processing fees on the full amount and will request some other sort of transfer for the remainder.

Also, this is very minor but phrases like "get on a call" or worse, references to jumping or hopping, really irritate me. What's wrong with that good old English verb "to have"? Or better yet, call is (believe it or not) a verb! Can I call you? Maybe. Can we hop on a quick call? Absolutely not.

This sort of cuts both ways, I’m on the small business selling side.

Sometimes somebody will want a call, I’ll do my dance, tell them the price, then they try to nickel and dime to get a lower price - which isn’t on offer. That blows a lot of my time.

On the other hand, the software I sell solves some novel problems at scale and is designed to be extensible - so in cases where somebody wants to build on the foundation I’ve built I really do need a call to figure out if there’s a missing feature or similar I’d need to build out, or if there’s some implementation detail that’s highly specialized to a given situation.

By and large my evolving strategy is to not have a fixed price listed online, and to reply to emails promptly with pricing with offer to have a call for complex situations.

As someone else posted, SpaceX lists their prices to launch things into space. Your software situations are more complex?

That doesn’t seem like a logical inference to me.

A house construction contractor doesn't have a price list for the sake of obscuring prices, nor because house construction is more complex than space flight.

It's because houses are custom and thus prices are too variable to list in any meaningful way.

For a SaaS product with significant custom integration work, it seems reasonable that prices might also vary in the same way.

A small-scale contractor doesn't have a price list, but a real estate developer who builds an entire subdivision at a time definitely has a price list. There might be taxes and fees on top of that, but everyone expects that anyway. At least the base product should have a clear price tag.

If I can tell in advance whether your SaaS product costs $10/seat/mo or $100/seat/mo, I'll probably feel more comfortable asking whether the custom integration work will cost $50k or $100k.

There are many companies that charge “x” per weight of “y” to go from “a” to “b”. How they get “y” from “a” to “b” is complex, but the actual pricing is quite simple compared to bespoke business solutions. It’s just freight.

> SpaceX can provide unique interfaces for Payloads with mechanical interfaces other than 8", 15", or 24". The Sales team will contact you with pricing if you select this optional service.

Case in point this dumpster fire of a product: aparavi.com

My least favorite is when I relent and get on their call, and after 30 minutes of answering their questions, they say "OK, next step is we'll schedule another call with our product specialist, because i'm just a sales guy and i didn't really understand most of that."

The worst part is that the sales person has to go back and pitch their team on whether it’s worth their time to get back to you.

What's the most expensive software you bought?

lol, believe it or not this was an interview question one of my Director of Engineering used to use to sus out the experience of people. As I read the parent comment I was thinking the same thing.

Be careful listening to this kind of advice. You never know what ballpark the "CTO" is playing in.

I'm just thinking about 6 to 7 figures software investment and trying to understand how you could do that without several meetings.

Easy, use JIRA and give your whole company seats. Add on some other Atlassian products and you'll quickly get to 4-5 figures per month.

I’m a CTO as well and never get on these types of calls to get more details and pricing since they can be such a big waste of time. Someone else from our organization will get on the call instead and then give me the pricing details so we can make a decision.

I’ve had too many bad sales experiences to deal with that. The second someone tries to force me into a sales call for a non-customized or self-configurable service or product, I assume they’re just shamelessly setting me up to extract as much money from me as they possibly can. I just can’t assume good faith on the part of a company that only distributes product information through someone making a commission. It feels like they’re inviting me into a mouse trap.

To add to those two, I need a working demo (in sandbox of course) of the product without which there's no way for me to validate to what extent your product meets my requirements. It doesn't matter how many screenshots, product explainers, videos you might have put up. Nothing comes close to a sandbox. Trial period is also fine.

At the beginning of this year i had some reflection on projects at two clients. While the businesses of both clients is vastly different, they were kinda using the same setup: One business critical system. The rest was mostly standard stuff and both companies are about the same size.

Client 1 contacted us by phone they needed to upgrade their IT. The appointed account manager and project leader had no clue of the clients business. The approval of the project took about two months. Engineering was involed after the approval. The project took more than a year, mostly because of communication chaos on both sides. Everybody was annoyed.

Client 2 contacted us by email they needed to upgrade their IT. The appointed account manager emailed engineering. After some emailing back and forth for a couple of days, both parties agreed on the project details. The approval of the project took about fifteen minutes. The project took about a month. We got cake.

It's simpler to forward an email to the relevant people and agree on goals, than to forward a phone call :-)

When my team organizes calls or onsite mtgs with vendors, they always tell them to remove the first 10 slides because we are not interested in why security matters, how it changed over the last 20 years and how great the company is.

They repeat this a few times so that it is clear.

Least week I had a meeting which started with the above, I asked if they knew what we asked, they said yes but they this is very important.

So I stayed, and when the ended the 15 slides with the hi

The last sentence got garbled?

(sorry, somehow the end vanished)

Do when they ended the 15 slides with their history I left the room.

I find out really annoying when a vendor knows better what we need to hear. But not all are like this, some start by saying that the first 10 slides were removed :)

When evaluating and making purchasing decisions for my security department, I have the same dislike of this approach. And generally for me it is a red flag.

Not (just) because of price gauging, but also because generally it is indicative of a very young company. In many cases they do not want to give the price because they don't know the price; they're still finding out how much they can charge.

“Get on a call” is code for “we have commissioned sales people and in order to make that work we can’t let inbound leads from our website bypass them”

We sell a devtool (FusionAuth, an authentication server).

We have clearish pricing on our website (the options are a bit confusing because you can self-host or pay for hosting), but we do have our enterprise pricing available for someone, and you can buy it with a credit card.

In my four years there, we've had exactly one purchase of enterprise via the website. But every enterprise deal that I'm aware of has researched pricing, including using our pricing calculator. Then they want to talk to understand their particular use case, nuances of implementation and/or possible discounts.

Maybe FusionAuth and its ilk are a different level of implementation difficulty than keygen? Maybe our docs aren't as good as they should be (the answer to this is yes, we can definitely improve them)? Maybe keygen will shift as they grow? (I noticed there was mention towards the bottom of the article about a short discovery call.)

All that to say:

* email/async communication is great

* meet your customers where they are

* docs are great and clear messaging pays off

* devtools at a certain price point ($50/month vs $3k/month) deserve different go to market motions

At least you offer a pricing calculator.

When we are doing vendor research, we often dequeue or deprioritize vendors that do not have any kind of pricing available for the tier we require. Generally speaking, we assume things like volume discounts are available. Also, it's good to get a rough idea of what the delta between "Pro" and "Enterprise" happens to be. Not infrequently the reason that delta isn't available is because it's stupid orders of magnitude different.

If we know that up front, we know not to waste our time tire kicking with a demo account.

So, the middle ground you describes would seem, to me, to be the right place to be. Giving your pricing page a cursory glance, I would rank it pretty highly for the kind of "initial investigation" we might do.

I think from an entrepreneur standpoint, if I see a space with vendors with non-transparent pricing, I often think "there's an opportunity there".

> I think from an entrepreneur standpoint, if I see a space with vendors with non-transparent pricing, I often think "there's an opportunity there".

That makes a ton of sense. IMO, it means one of two things:

* prices are so high because of the cost of goods sold or margins that they'll scare off anyone researching and therefore there might be an 80% solution that can be priced transparently and eat the market

* the company is still exploring pricing and doesn't have a firm grasp on COGS; this means there is some kind of blue ocean opportunity

I'm also a CTO frequently making product decisions, and I refer to it as "Boomer pricing." You want to get on a call with me to assess the size of my company and whether or not I have some bureaucratic, unconcerned entity with an indiscriminate pocketbook. Clear pricing up front, and ideally a pricing calculator, or I don't even consider it.

If I make a product, I don't want you to use it because you found me first and I happened to harangue you on a sales call. I want you to find my product, compare it will full transparency to the other products, and go with mine if it best suits you. Anybody who behaves differently I immediately assume to be behaving in bad faith and is not actually confident in their product on its own merits.

> I want you to find my product, compare it will full transparency to the other products, and go with mine if it best suits you. Anybody who behaves differently I immediately assume to be behaving in bad faith and is not actually confident in their product on its own merits.

Totally agree. I think this why I hated the enterprise sales dance so much -- if somebody doesn't want to buy, I don't want to sell; if they don't know what they're buying, they probably aren't the type of customer I'm looking for i.e. likely to become a support burden.

> There are numerous products I likely would have purchased, but I either find a substitute or just go without because I won't play the stupid "let's get on a call" game.

> I've rolled-my-own solution more than once as well when there were no other good competitors.

I don't want to be rude but this sounds like terrible business decisions. I would say this is a case of cutting your nose off to spite your face but I suspect it's not your money your wasting rolling-your-own solution. Like it normally costs a lot more in dev resources to build instead of buying. And it seems like your doing it because of your ego and your unwillingness to play stupid games.

That's a significant over-simplification and ends up wrong in many cases. Build vs. buy is largely the same equation as rent vs. own in real estate or automobiles. Generally speaking, in the short term renting is almost always cheaper, but there's a break-even point at which buying (aka building) becomes cheaper. Owning the system also grants considerable ability to build it to be exactly what you need, instead of hacking around deficiencies and/or begging your account manager to get your feature approved and implemented.

There are plenty of situations in which the terrible business decision is to rent instead of build. The difficulty is that without knowing the future it's not always clear, so you have to use your best judgment and hope you get it right.

Edit: Also don't forget that roll-your-own doesn't necessarily mean starting something from scratch. In many cases I opted to use and self-host an open source project that sometimes is sufficient all on its own, and when not we can make changes to it. I almost never start a non-trivial project from scratch just to avoid buying, unless it's a major piece of our product or value proposition in which case you have to consider the risk of building on a foundation you don't control.

> Build vs. buy is largely the same equation as rent vs. own in real estate or automobiles.

I would say this is not a valid analogy. If you buy real estate you have an asset. However, if you build something that is not your core product you have a liability and not an asset. You're not going to get more money because you have a bunch of tech you built that you could have bought.

I'm 100% agreement, right down to the CTO/CIO role. I just don't do business with them, period. I have a strict rule not to do business with people how cold call/cold email, hide info, and force pointless meetings. Once salesmen realize that I'm actually a very low maintenance customer who just knows what they want, they love me, I'm free commission to them because they never have to expend energy on me.

That’s so true, I have seen a company that offer a chat over Slack, so basically did the entire qualification you mentioned over the chat and gave me some high level data I needed before a full demo call. 2 minutes, no sales fluff. That’s was a nice touch.

Not being upfront about prices is a major red flag, I associate it with someone selling pyramid schemes, or snake oil.

If I ask price and you insist on showing me a presentation to get me hooked and invested, I'm out. At that point you are bound to be talking to a salesman whose job it is to sell and you are experiencing a process that was designed and perfected to manipulate you into buying.

I don't want to buy from salesmen usually, directly from the manufacturer or provider is better, cut the middleman out. OTOH I have to be open to some imperfections, if we have to wait for someone or be inexperienced with sales process (introduction too long), that's fine.

On some industries it's possible for someone to do the work without saying price even. An electrician might be happy to do the work without talking about price, and then you have almost no recourse when it's a shitload.