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Comment by puzzle | Hacker News Reader

I seem to remember that the features now available as Enterprise-only were not listed as such during development. Even if that's not the case, it's still a bummer. And it really sucks having to go through a salesperson's spiel just to get an idea of the costs. I hate it when companies don't post list prices on their site. I'm also looking at you, Hashicorp, and your Vault Enterprise.

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>I hate it when companies don't post list prices on their site.

Same here. If SpaceX can openly advertise their prices, then so can you.

[0] http://www.spacex.com/about/capabilities

On the topic of enterprise features and specifically, Hashicorp Vault, I did ask Hashicorp sales if it was possible to trial Vault Enterprise (for the UI) without the pre-sales dance and was flatly told "no".

This kind of attitude really rubs me the wrong way. On follow up from their sales I simply told them I opted for an open source UI from Github.

While I want to support the work Hashicorp are doing, I want to be treated as someone who understands that I don't need to spend money on the product. It's a concern to me that as these open source projects find ways to monetise they start to slowly make their way back to the type of ecosystem that I wanted to avoid in the first place.

To be honest, it takes one email to get our pricing, and we mostly use it to stay in touch and understand your use-case better.

Thanks for feedback though, we will work on making it easier to get the pricing and explain the split between enterprise and OSS parts of teleport better.

So just to chime in on this, I'd echo others in saying that "call for pricing" or any variants thereof, are a huge turnoff to me in terms of buying software.

It instantly makes me think "this will be expensive" and "if I call and it's not right for me, I'll be getting hassled by sales people forever more"

Now, neither of these things may be true for your software, but people who've experienced the pain of buying "enterprise" software before will likely be put off by this approach.

It also gives the impression that pricing isn't fixed and that the sales process will involve lots of haggling, which also puts people who don't like haggling off.

Actually by not posting your price upfront, is actually wasting time for both you and the client. You see if I have a budget for a solution of 60USD and your solution starts at 6000USD I know to look elsewhere. But if you don't what will happen is you will collect my email to "stay in touch" about a product I have no use for, increasing my spam by 1. My email address in your mailing list is wasting my inbox space and your time. In fact your mailing list is probably what you use to give your sales person. But it's counter productive instead of having 100 potential customer who have accepted your pricing for your product, now you have 10000 people who may or may not be interested. So now your sales staff have to spend time chasing up cold leads instead of focusing on 100 customers whom they have a higher chance of closing. So you see by not posting the price you are causing harm to your own sales pipeline and one more person to make you as a spammer.

Chances are if you need to contact the company for pricing details their product is not going to be in the sub-$100 range (or possibly even the sub-$1000 range)

"Contact us for pricing" means "unless price is no object, forget about it" in my experience. Every time I've followed up with a "contact for pricing" product, the reply has been for 10-100x what I was expecting.

If you're selling to only Fortune 100s, that's fine. If you're aiming a little lower than that, not giving a public price of some kind up front is driving away a lot of potential customers.

And to be clear: it is your product and it's your choice how to develop it or make it available on the market. The only reason that I took the time to vent is that I actually like Teleport a lot. You won't see me complain about Oracle or Symantec pricing details. :-)

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