Comment by px1999 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by px1999 | Hacker News Reader

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A negotiable pricing structure hides the true value of the product behind needless bureaucracy and interaction. Not having a sticker price (even a "no one actually pays this much" sticker price, like MSFT's) makes fair comparisons impossible without getting into a high-touch sales cycle.

For them, it's almost surely meant lost sales.

In my org, I'm the one who would be making the decision to trial products like this. For me, it's meant that they haven't gotten a serious look-in. We don't have particular code quality issues so I'm not shopping around between static analysis tools, but I am always open to improving our processes. The bar that they need to reach in order for me to spend time seriously evaluating their product is much higher. If the software was eg 10k/yr it's a very different matter to it being 100k.

I'm curious about the product and the benefits that it brings over our existing static analysis setup (SonarQube + Resharper + Microsoft Code Analysis), and if I had any idea what I'd be getting into I'd probably have set up an instance somewhere, but that's time that I'm not prepared to spend without at least some idea of whether it could even result in us making a buy.

Neither my time, nor that of anyone else in my org is free. I'm not going to evaluate a product, make a decision and then ask how much to see if the vendor has reasonable prices. Even used car lots list prices on their cars so you can judge a "worst case" cost and filter out the absolutely ridiculous ones.

So you say you are serious and open to improving your process, but you would refuse to look at a product because 10 minutes (or insert nominal time sending an email) is more time than you're willing to spend to obtain a demo/quote. Well, its your choice, but frankly I don't quite see the logic behind it. Personally I think the 10 minutes (and I have spent more on similar products) is time well spent if the potential upside is gaining several days time spent finding and fixing bugs. Even if it finds one bug, you'd probably recover the 10 minutes as far as lost time goes.

Edit: This applies in this specific context, where the market is not exactly deluged with code analyzers.

If the business was burning down because of code quality issues, I'd definitely navigate through whatever process the vendor throws my way to get access to their software. Same if I woke up one day and decided "we need to throw away our static analysis and find a replacement". Same if the email exchange was only 10 minutes with 1 email going each way (ha!)

But none of those are the case, we have no serious problems with our existing process, nor any real incentive to actually try out alternative static analysis setups. What drives us to find something better is curiosity. Every month or two, I'll see something related to our process (not specifically code quality), look into it along with another alternative or two, and try to figure out quickly if it's worth dedicating time to look at it in depth. I'm making that initial decision based on 10 minutes of skimming the vendor's website. I don't want to sink a week of peoples' time into actually properly setting something up to find out that our org will be charged higher fees than we expect (in much the same way that I don't want to drag a bunch of people into a meeting room for a couple of hours for a product demo until we've independently verified that the product can actually work for us; or set something up and have it bite us a couple of years down the road when it's become entrenched in our processes).

Realistically, I have a fair idea of how much the software will likely cost. From what I've seen (assuming I'm correct), the price (low 5 figures) wouldn't be a dealbreaker (though it would definitely have to bring some advantages when compared to what we've got now in order to sell it to management). But, after a number of our negative b2b experiences w/ opaque pricing (eg price scheme changes at the end of the contract term, or being billed higher than others because we were [at that time] reliant on the product) we know that there's a cost involved in this. It's something that is worth some dollar amount for us to avoid.

I want a binding quote that I know is going to scale linearly with our organisation; a dollar figure that's not going to change sharply in 3,4,5 years; no significant meddling by salespeople -- all in addition to a solid product. Published and available-to-anyone prices help ensure that.

I just want to note that I'm not against OOO in any way, or even saying anything bad about their software, but opaque pricing on products just doesn't make sense for us (much in the same way as products-as-subscription don't make sense for us, even though we normally keep up to date with upgrades/support).

Okay fair enough. Thanks for explaining your position.

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