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Comment by AdamJacobMuller | Hacker News Reader

Unlikely you'll find any good source.

"contact us" pricing revolves around understanding the customer's use case deeply enough so that you can demonstrate maximum product value to them and then extract the most possible money. I despise it.

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Sometimes I ask sales people of these companies, "why is it that SpaceX can give me a price for launching something into space, with detailed manuals about how to prepare all my interfaces, but you have to take 2 weeks to think about how much to charge me?"

Yes I know the comparison isn't quite right, but sometimes you just have to put some pressure on bro salespeople coming in, making shit up, and trying to test how willing you are to pay for something they haven't even built yet, and pricing it to maximally extract value later. Otherwise they'll start to think it's reasonable.

Most of them do already think it’s reasonable!

You cannot tell SpaceX to move up their launch date for you. You cannot send a payload that exceeds the weight or size limits. You cannot tell them that you don't like the color of the rocket since it doesn't fit with your brand. As far as sales go, it's easy for SpaceX to publish their prices because it's the most rigid type of service possible.

Enterprise SaaS is the exact opposite. The product that is listed on the website is just a starting point. There are teams of sales reps, account managers, solutions architects and more who will customize it exactly to the customer's liking, and all that needs to be priced.

Exactly. This is the reason some smaller self-driving companies exist, even though Tesla has pretty much dominated the space. Tesla might have superior tech, but it's not for sale.

also if you screw up bad enough as a spacex customer and not meet their payload requirements after so many failed attempts then they refuse to ever do business with you again.

SpaceX has years-long development timelines, huge capital and personnel costs, and huge liabilities/risks. Yet they can give you predictable pricing and understandable margins and cost models. Sure they are rigid in their requirements, but that pales in comparison to / is far from them using it as a pricing factor in comparison with the requirements asked of a sales guy selling a software team's services.

At the heart of it, the ridiculous pricing practices of "contact us" pricing are to test what a customer is willing to pay.

Have a look at this ML-favorite lately. $50/month for a general user turns into something you will not believe for corporate users. Totally testing what they can get away with. https://wandb.ai/site/pricing

I'll defend it because I'm doing it: We have a very very young company, and we are building our product with our customers. We are in fact charging very little right now with the understanding that our product is immature, and later we plan to increase pricing to get to a profitable level. There is absolutely no way to come up with any sort of standard pricing for us, since each customer means a lot of feature and customer support.

It's a different question when you're in an MVP stage and for very different reasons.

Without knowing literally anything about what you're doing, I would still suggest you try to put some price where you can't lose money on the site with a group/bulk/quantity discounts available button. Especially put the same button on all the pricing pages inside your UI/interface as well. When people think you're too expensive, you want to confront them with "hey, let's talk."

I'd love to have a way to scare salespeople straight by showing them how many sales they are losing because of this bad practice.

For the sales people, it rarely results in missed sales they care about. The ones who are super into this are almost always commission. If the company does less overall revenue (due to fewer overall sales), that is not a problem as long as they get more overall revenue (commission) due to the sales they land being ‘richer’. It’s a pretty classic owner/agent issue.

The company should care, probably, but there are also reasons for some companies to prefer high touch interactions - it gives huge insight from a product perspective, and can provide insights to tackle other verticals they might otherwise struggle to even know existed.

Going in volume does make good numbers though, if you’re setup in a way that you can keep it going. Toyota, Honda, etc. have very solid fleet and ‘pay the flat rate and go’ markets they serve.

Again I can vouche for seeing this in the physical industrial world. Sales only care about landing big deals with big margins, couldn't care less about many, many small fish. They wine and dine big clients and then build summer homes in the local hot spots off those projects commissions.

I've worked for such a company. If asked for a "price list", they will ask an intern to create a customer-specific price list, based on nr. of users/nr. of transactions/nr. of whatever, that will certainly lead to the target price (based on optimistic estimation of product value).

Why? Companies usually buy something to make more money with or avoid losses, either directly, or indirectly. If something costs 500k a year but helps make the company 10M, or prevent a 10M hack, that's a win-win in my book.

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