Worse than that, calls aren't usually tracked. They will forget they told you "oh we won't increase the price next year," but they'll damn well remember the green engineer you invited to sit the call who blurted out that the $75k/yr license fee was "within budget".
Then someone at a large organization can multiply this number by the expected number of licenses they'll need, and get a ballpark estimate for the (upper bound of the) costs of the service, which is a critical input in determining whether it's even worthwhile to consider talking to the vendor. Having that information, the organization can then schedule a call to negotiate whatever extra adaptations and discounts they need, or realize signing up is unlikely to have positive ROI and skip it, which also saves the seller from wasting their time on a deal that won't come through.
Vendors that hide critical information and pricing behind a phone call are eating the risk of having their time wasted on negotiating deals that would never succeed, trading it for a chance to scam some clueless or loss-insensitive companies for some big money.
That or they have "customers" who are knowingly or unknowingly incentivized to have the vendor succeed.
People in marketing, often even those in higher levels, know Google analytics. They have demonstrated experience with it. They want to keep using it. They want their employees to keep using it. Google Analytics plus or whatever it is called iirc does not have a pricing page publicly available.
Why does Google not have pricing available publicly? Why do customers put up with Google? Is there any other reason?
PS for those curious, I think this is one of the limitations we hit with Google Analytics free
> Custom dimensions: 20 custom dimensions
It's not worth the effort.
It's killing your ability to scale your sales process. Unique adaptations kill your ability to scale product development, as now you have a bunch of one off deployments. Figure out ahead of time what discounts you want for various tiers of user count.
If you are a startup, avoiding things that don't let you scale are critical.
YES!
Adding features just for single customers doesn't scale, adding features useful to many customers does.
None of this means "hiding" information, but you can't put something like "We'll do X hrs of extra work if you buy Y licenses". Just like the any store might have a 10% discount if you buy a dozen, but if you want 50,000 then there will probably be a conversation involved.
What kind of products are you buying where you don’t know what they do?
Enterprise sales wishes they could have customer fill up carts.
Are we considering products like Salesforce or SAP "enterprise app platforms" here?
Look for any of a million news reports on multi-year "integrations" (sometimes even failed ones but always over budget).
What normally happens: * Enterprise customer's CIO/Legal/Security team demands SSO.
* You are put in touch with some support guy in India in IT
* He doesn't know so has to go out to some external consultancy to work with whatever hell they've layered on top of Entra ID
* You end up getting sent a SAML configuration
* Said SAML configuration doesn't work for some reason so you reach out again.
* You wait for a response for a month
* The people who actually want to use the product are getting annoyed
* Somehow an exception is made, so user accounts get created, people start using the product.
* 6 months later the exception is up, you've still not heard from their IT team despite badgering them.
* Suddenly their IT team gets into gear, it all gets set up and is working.
* Two years later, the SAML configuration is due to expire. You reach out to the customer contact and the whole game starts all over again because of course all the people you previously spoke to have left.
A super valuable solution to your problem is pernicious because...checks notes...a provider is trying to align their pricing with the value it creates with solving your problem.
I can't scratch my head hard enough.
That's just an euphemism for "a provider is trying to capture for themselves all the value their product creates for you".
A real head scratcher. Perhaps has something to do with there being no point of buying if all (or even most) of the value flows back to the seller? Unless you're a nail wholesaler and are happy with 0.1% margins because you sell by truckloads anyway.
Even worse, your tier may have 10 options but still not capture the 5 they need.
So you negotiate, and they provide you the 5 you need at a reasonable price.
This is standard.
Oh, and negotiating a trial period is almost always a must. Perhaps a 2 week free trial is not enough for the customer. If you could bump it to 4 weeks, it could lead to a lucrative sale.
The thing I want to desperately avoid is wasting time dancing around the salesmen trying to overhype their product while staying vague on the details, in hopes to get me to buy (and pay as much as I can) regardless of whether I get any value from it.
And what precisely is the problem? Obviously, we have incomplete information, but in efficient markets ALL providers all trying to capture the full value of the solution they provide. With infinite time, markets essentially adjust themselves towards this goal. As long as that number is 99.99% (meaning the buyer creates an additional 0.01% of economical value) it's still valuable for BOTH parties.
FWIW most SaaS businesses severely underprice their offering relative to the economic value they create.
Of course, if they're a monopoly provider and the buyer really needs it, they have to cough up. But generally there are substitute products. So the buyer would do well to look for an alternative that doesn't do differential pricing to capture more surplus for themselves.
Because:
1) In efficient markets, all users also try to capture full value they get from the they bought. Efficient competition is purely adversarial.
2) You say, "As long as that number is 99.99% (...) it's still valuable for BOTH parties". Unfortunately, incomplete information and information asymmetry makes it more than likely that the "is trying to align their pricing" so that this number is more than 100%. That is, if you're not careful, they'll scam you.
The two above are arguments why this is a problem for the buyer, in practice. The next one is more general:
3) Everything that's good and nice and human happens inside economic inefficiencies. For human beings, a truly efficient market is a literal definition of hell - everyone's suffering as much as possible, spending all their energy to earn exactly enough to barely survive.
> FWIW most SaaS businesses severely underprice their offering relative to the economic value they create.
As it should be.
I'll say here what I say to people who talk about stopping to post anything publicly, lest it ends up in LLM training data:
Trying to capture for yourself 100% of the economic value you're producing is an extreme form of greed. When companies try to do that, they get called evil and used as examples of everything that's wrong with late-stage capitalism and such. Human society works best when people don't capture all their productive output, when they actually do leave some money on the table, because this allows others to take it and use it to innovate and create more value - which, again, if they don't capture entirety of it, allows even more people to build on top of it.
All of us who produce, we also consume. Society and its markets form an ecosystem, which needs some inefficiency to evolve, be resilient and thrive.
(See also: running any system at 100% capacity is "efficient" up until some random event causes the load to grow ever so slightly, even for a tiny moment, at which point the system suffers a cascade of failures and dies.)
And all of us engineers get paid REALLY WELL because people sell software for us. Software is cheap relative to its value. Stop complaining that you're getting ripped off.
> Human society works best when people don't capture all their productive output, when they actually do leave some money on the table, because this allows others to take it and use it to innovate and create more value - which, again, if they don't capture entirety of it, allows even more people to build on top of it.
You have no evidence to support this.
That's not at all clear, an it's its own can of worms.
A lot of software, even widely-used software, may as well have negative real value, because its perceived value is just an accounting trick. Any time you see software allowing someone to do something that required a specialist before, particularly in company setting, it's more than likely that the value is negative. Think e.g. everyone doing their own expenses. A company used to have a bunch of moderately paid jobs dedicated to doing that. Naturally, people doing those jobs quickly got very efficient at it. In comes software, those jobs get eliminated, and now you're having everyone - including all the absurdly highly paid engineers (software or otherwise) - having to semi-regularly (not regularly enough to get efficient at it) drop what they're doing and spend half a day or more on doing expenses. Productivity goes down across the board for obvious reasons. But, what the business sees, is a) legible savings on eliminated finance jobs, and b) mysterious "costs disease" that seems to be affecting the company (and market at large), keeping productivity below expectations.
Mysterious my ass.
Then, a lot of software is directly or indirectly serving adtech. This is where most of the high salaries in tech come from. Software is cheap and programmers are paid well because it's all funded by scamming everyday people and ruining their lives. That's a nearly inexhaustible money source. The actual value of all that software provides people, integrated over the entire society? Deeply in the negative.
Then, there's plenty of SaaS businesses that would be more ergonomic and efficient if replaced by an Excel spreadsheet. Those deliver negative value to customers almost by definition.
Etc.
Sure, there's some software that's delivering way more value than it costs. But there's much less of such software than people think.
How many such companies even exist at any given point in time? In software in particular, that's going to be almost none, and those few that are, won't be that for long. For everyone else, there are already competitors doing the same thing, and even more competitors solving the same problem in a different way[0], giving you data points for roughly what prices make sense. Between that and your costs being the lower bound, you almost certainly have something to work with.
--
[0] - There's no "someone has to be the first" bootstrap paradox here. Even if you're lucky enough to genuinely be the first to market with something substantially new, it still is just an increment on some existing solution, and solves a variant of some existing problem, so there is data to go on.
For a company wanting to make a profit, you need to cover your costs, so that's a minimum, with some reasonable profit on top.
If you can't figure that out either, well...
9 times out of 10 even when you get on a call with them they just tell you the product does everything but their "consulting" or "support" will work to "configure" the product for you to do it. Meaning, it doesn't do that and they are going to sell you high priced consulting to ram their square peg into your round hole until you either beg them to stop or become stockholmed and invested enough that you are persuading your own stakeholders that it really does what it was supposed to.
- it implies differential pricing, meaning they will charge you as much as possible both now and in the future (when you may be locked in)
- it usually obscures what the product actually does
Differential pricing is really pernicious because if the product happens to be super valuable to you, they're likely to find out and charge you even more