"A dark pattern is "a user interface that has been carefully crafted to trick users into doing things, such as buying overpriced insurance with their purchase or signing up for recurring bills"."[0]
By this definition, no, it's not a dark pattern. It may be a pricing strategy that you don't like, but not a dark pattern. It's an invitation to start a full discussion with the vendor about what you're trying to achieve.
Usually, you'll see "Contact Us" on the pricing page for enterprise services. If you're an enterprise buyer, you usually have lots of people on your team who want different things. You might have special requirements for your industry. You probably need to sign a contract for special provisions or services.
Or maybe the vendor is in a new market and they're trying to learn about their customers with an MVP. How many times have you seen the recommendation here on HN to set up a landing page and add a button that says "Email me if you're interested"? Same idea.
But I think that they simply believe that they are more likely to make a sale if they screen for only people interested enough to submit a request for a quote. That's not really a dark pattern, yeah. It's not a trick, they just don't want to sell stuff that way.
Vici-Valco is the most confusing one to me for this, but I believe for them it's to create a barrier to keep small time orders out. Basically, I don't think that they make much money on me ordering ten compression fittings so if they make it too easy to find prices and order stuff without human intervention they'd spend proportionally more time on small clients? It's odd, I mean, they do have a catalog and the catalog has prices. It's just super hard to order online or find pricing otherwise.
At first I thought it was really dumb, because they're in a technology sector and deal with engineers all the time. Why not just take me to a shopping cart? But then I got an email that said something like "HeyLaughingBoy, I noticed you bought 5 units of $SENSOR in July and another 10 units in August. Would you like to discuss volume prices going forward? We can scale the price to your estimated annual volume..."
I thought it was a great idea to get a dialog going with someone who looks small time (me) but could become a major customer. This way, they build a relationship with me before I just start looking for someone cheaper as my sales grow. If they just listed prices at preset volume levels, that would never happen.
Any email list that failed to observe this would not be useful other than for the small companies looking for the feature/price floor.
Or if you just ask... I've definitely gotten 5-10% "discounts" multiple times just by asking if they can give me one. I figure this is the "wasn't price sensitive enough to ask" surcharge.
But if the prices were super random feeling yeah, for sure. I haven't personally run into more than a ~5-10% variation myself usually.
I think the only time I hear about it is when I get a price from a vendor, turn them down, and then have them come back with an offer for the same thing at 25% off. At that point they're kind of highlighting that their pricing is 25% higher than it needs to be for them to make a healthy profit so while I might take them up on it (once) I'm extremely likely to find a new vendor.
I've definitely done that before with a company that had dramatically overpriced high speed cameras. We kept ordering from them because we didn't want to worry about changing the brand. I doubt we'll order from them again.
There are pricing pages that have price x, price y and "enterprise contact us". So maybe vendor that has only "contact us" is selling only to F500 and I am not a customer for them.
The one that immediately jumps to mind is "Add this item to your cart to see the price".
There's no good intention there, just manipulation. The statistics show a user is more likely to buy an item after adding it to their cart, and this forces them to do that before revealing pertinent information to the user.
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Basically - If it's not a solution that can be customized to the user/customer, I find hiding the price is almost always a dark pattern.
If it is a solution that can be customized, it may or may not be a dark pattern, but I still tend to avoid companies that do this - it often means they want additional information from me, or that they're hoping additional sales and marketing information will make me less price sensitive before showing me the final price.
https://www.consumerreports.org/online-shopping/why-do-i-hav...
Product-led companies usually have plans for all usage sizes including custom plans for large enterprises.
Sales-led almost always don't want to be in business with the long-tail of the market. That sales call is their way of effectively filtering those customers out.
see also: https://blog.close.com/product-led-sales-led-marketing-led/
I'm sorry but what is a dark pattern if that doesn't qualify?
It ensures you are captured as a lead and establishes a human connection. Serious buyers have no problem getting on the phone.
The fixed price you were quoted is a starting point for negotiation. It's the "book price", aka the chump price. You're leaving money on the table if you're not haggling with them or finding a way to get a better deal.
Enterprise culture is to negotiate price. They have purchasing teams - multiple people whose entire job is to get a better deal than whatever is listed on the website or the first number quoted over the phone.
These people are hard nosed and have zero problems calling for a price. A good purchaser on a big enough deal would rather hunt down your sales team on linkedin and start talking than accept a list price on your website.
As an aside:
How many people would hang a sign around their neck with a fixed price when looking for non-contract employment?
How many slap a fixed price on the side of their house during a sale?
Fixed prices are in some ways the anomaly; haggling mostly disappears when the cost of negotiation exceeds the benefit of price discrimination and products and customers are fungible.
Personally I love fixed prices but most business does not work like that.
Everyone? Every house listing I've seen has a price on it. Negotiating can happen but advertising a price is the norm.
When my employer (only ~300 people) switched to salesforce it took 3 years from when we started looking at vendors to completing the switch. Buying software at this level is not just adding it to your cart, its creating a project that will take up huge chunks of dev time. Its a discussion between parties, and the price (contract) takes months of work to agree on.
We hired a consultant literally just for redlining. https://blog.pandadoc.com/what-is-contract-redlining-and-con...
Just because you can implement easily does not mean 90% of the vendor's customers can.
Without this you either end up with one of two scenarios. Scenario 1: companies price extremely high on paper and then negotiate down afterwards, as happens in the US health insurance markets, and it’s a nightmare. Or scenario 2 the producer ends up pricing for their profit maximizing volume, which at constant price means customers who realize greater utility are subsidized by those who realize the least utility.
Consider a very real example: AWS charges outrageous markups on bandwidth. This is because many organizations realize far greater value from the AWS ecosystem and are willing to pay. This prices out people who are more price sensitive, and means they end up using a competitor, even if Amazon would happily sell them bandwidth at a lower price. They simply can’t without canibalizing their fatter customers.
I’ve negotiated services for startups at a fraction of the cost of what larger companies are paying (on the order of 90% less) because of this dark pattern.
They're either getting income/revenue information that's connected in some way to the number you called from, or you're providing just enough information to enable them to quote a particular price for you.
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...
If your needs are served by the standard packages and you want to hook the thing up to your Slack for notifications, that's super. There is a pricing plan for that.
If you need basically a full year's worth of effort to hook this service up to your environment, and you want the experts involved with doing this integration, there's a kind of pricing plan for that, too.
The latter just does not look reasonable on a web page, because it starts with "it depends" and scales (non-?)linearly.
If your price point is much less than this you should probably just have users self-service with a credit card.
But the reason they do those dumb meetings is it seems related to their performance measurement, which is ultimately by revenue, but it is a function of deals and their stage through their sales pipeline. How do you measure the quarterly performance of a sales person when the average enterprise sales cycle can be 6-18 months? Number of deals in the pipeline per stage and probability of that revenue landing.
By forcing stupid meetings to get the most minor bit of information, they can move my "deal," into a pipeline stage that improves the perception of their performance numbers, independently of whether revenue is ultimately realized. If you are a startup they need those numbers for projections that go into investor and analyst presentations that get you the funding to stay alive, and it's why you don't want engineers to say something or add information that will collapse the superposition of everyone's ability to believe long enough to survive to a more stable state.
My experience has been that enterprise sales are bizarre political intrigues that are divorced from features and product qualities, where concreteness itself becomes the enemy. So, tl;dr: "contact us for pricing," isn't so much a dark pattern as it is the outer edge of an infinite existential void.
I'm sure there is a more optimistic explanation though.
1. There's not much competition for the product, so the seller has no reason to compete on price and make things easy to compare
2. The sales process / cycle for that industry requires so many stakeholders and agreements etc that pre-committing to a price range up front is just an unnecessary handicap. They'll be in negotiations with numerous executives with a prospective buyer potentially for years before getting a signature. In these situations the buyer is not a naive consumer, they're a corporation that can take care of themselves and giving out the price is a free point in that game.
3. They haven't sold anything yet. They are still in the research phase and are feeling out what people might pay.
The business execs that I'd have to involve to contact you for pricing are, firstly - cheap, secondly - are probably going to outnegotiate you, thirdly - introduces a whole level of complexity to the process that I'd rather just pick your competitor and ask for approval.
On the other hand, we offer a custom plan that has a contact us for pricing button. Because in that plan we are gonna do whatever we can to add as much value as possible for your business. Mostly integrations and updates on legacy systems.
The same idea applies when selling other products to companies, with slightly different dollar thresholds.
It's insulting in that they could just give me the information but they won't because they think I am too stupid to understand it "the way they intend it" (i.e., in a way that doesn't solve my problem or does so using mostly marketing buzzwords that cause endless technical implementation issues and waste so very much time).
The buzzword I've learned to dislike the most is "RESTful!". It means that your API is written by developers who don't my industry at all. And no, it doesn't matter what industry. RESTful means you've started with a set of premises that don't work in the real work except under very limited circumstances (like distributing media files).
It's self-destructive in that any normal people aren't interested in a sales pitch. They just want information. If you aren't going to provide that then you're at the bottom of the list and we're probably going with a competitor of yours unless you somehow find out that I need a similar product and you start calling upper management. That's the worst-case scenario... now we aren't implementing technology that fits into our use case and architecture, we're dealing with a push from senior management to use technology that doesn't work. We know that a sales call means your product sucks. Hard.
At face value no, this isn't a dark pattern. But experience tells me otherwise. If your product is "contact us for a quote!" then I already know it won't work and is overpriced because you have to work so very hard to "sell" it. Could I be wrong? Yes. Have I been wrong? No. In 30 years of doing this.
Wow... I guess I had a lot to say on this subject. I feel so much better now. ;-)
There are only a few reasons where I could see 'contact us for pricing' being appropriate:
1 Volatility caused by unknown market or price war, where competitor keeps causing price stability issues.
2 Complex purchase - too many confusing options - so we have to have a sales person walk you through it. 'So you want a web page and you need a specific person to do it ...'
3 Contractual - in rare instances a vendor can purchase excess product, at a steep discount. But are not allowed to advertise the price.
All other options make me think of a used car salesman trying to figure out how much they can do you for.
That said, I'm shocked they'd do this for a simple product selling a single item. It wouldn't be worth the time spent on the phone.
You don't show the price because you want me to talk to a salesperson that has to justify the price. I don't want to talk to a sales person. I want a demo account if it's a service and a number for a technical person to answer questions
Save the pitch for someone who gives a damn
The sales person is an impediment to the sales process
I do clearly state pricing for the normal plans, otherwise that would just push away most of the customers.
Typical for overpriced products or middlemen-driven sales pipeline
Range gives you the floor (if they are honest). Let's say the range is 65k-85K, then its fair game to say that the best candidate may get 85K but a good enough may only get 65K or say 70K. Also as a candidate if you are looking for 100K min, you know this position is not for you.
There are too many confounding variables involved with the very abstract concept of 'work effort,' for it to be reliably used. Instead, set a price for the role, and if someone is exceeding their anticipated productivity and putting more work on their back, give them a raise.
My company for example will hire F players. We'll even hire G or H players too. Those are the roles that we are actually hiring for when we open up an entry level job. However if a C player comes along, naive and fresh out of a masters program, we'll also snap them up and pay an absolutely exorbitant rate compared to the normal salary range for their position because we want them to stay for at least 5 years. In 5 years, if they improve they'll be A or B players and we'll bump them into Director level roles in the hope that they will stay due to the responsibility and freedom the role offers even though we can't pay Google-level salaries.
Having a posted initial salary will just scare off a candidate who is unnaturally good versus the rest of the local market.
Disclaimer:
I like to think I am/was a solid C rated developer. If you are an A player, I bow to your wisdom. I have never applied to FAANG. I know I wouldn't make even the phone cut.
the one who benefits the most from the "range" solution is the employer, really.
How do you classify something as the same job versus a different job though? Two developers may have roughly similar responsibilities but one may be much better than the other. And it would be reasonable to pay them more in those circumstances, but it's very hard to quantify that objectively.
Also, Google is a huge company so they can advertise 5 jobs at different levels and fill them all. Whereas smaller companies may want someone and not be too sure about what level they need: it may depend more on who they can get. They can't afford to be too picky.
So that would be done away with? No thanks. I'm happy that people have varying skillsets and that employers can pay more or less for a posting based on the person they choose.
Workers also do not want to work cheaper than they can get, and last I checked, there's over 5 million companies in the US, and plenty of evidence that those companies are competing for labor.
So they do bid on labor. If a company does not match it's competitors, employees move. And a company has every incentive to pay more than competitors, up to the break even point, since it gets them better employees.
Even if a few companies collude, it open the door for a competitor to break ranks and steal employees. This breaking of ranks is prevalent in all sorts of cartels around the world - it's nearly impossible to make companies stick to an agreement when by breaking it they can gain advantage over rivals.
The carnival metaphor makes little sense. Employees and employers are in a market trading goods, nothing more, nothing less.