That's not how I read these at all. "Contact Us" means the company doesn't have set pricing but rather will have a sales person/department that will structure a specific deal and negotiate a contract for your business's specific needs.
If someone refuses to openly list prices they're either:
- Embarrassed by the amount of money they're charging
- Aware they charge more than others and don't want to let you comparison shop easily
- Planning on setting as high a price as possible depending on how much you can be fleeced into payingThere's a large and very lucrative industry around just implementing SaaS software.
If they want to sell their services as custom services, that's the business model - and in this case, they want to make a clear point from the very beginning that this is not a commodity and every deal is a bespoke deal. Even if the technical platform is the same, every business relationship is custom and individually negotiated, with zero expectation that the price you get is in any way related to the prices someone else gets - sometimes that works against you, sometimes that works for you, but that's the business model they've chosen.
The last decade of my career has been multi-million dollar project after project of just setting up and customizing enterprise SaaS software for a customer's specific need.
"how much you can be fleeced into paying" while a proactive way to phrase it, is also "What you are willing to pay." Key words - "you are willing". If it's too high, then it isn't a price, as there is no agreement.
Seller wants highest price, and buyer wants lowest.
When it's a commodity, like apples at the store, with many sellers of a basically undifferentiated product, prices average out to something we think of as "fair." But when a product is unique, or there is a monopoly on it, seller has a huge advantage in pricing.
The difference is that most companies aren't pricing their goods to the maximum amount they think they can get from you personally. They instead price things according to what the majority of their target market is willing to pay.
You can say that ultimately it still comes down to paying only what you're willing to spend, but I might be willing to spend $20 on something, yet also be unwilling to spend $20 on it if I know you've been charging everybody else $12 for that same product. Consumers find personalized dynamic pricing to be unfair and discriminatory and for good reason. There's a really big difference between a company who uses their advantage in pricing to screw over everybody for extra profit and one who uses their advantage to personally screw you over in order to take more from you than they could normally get away with.
Publicly disclosed prices that apply equally to everyone puts a boundary on much a company can take advantage of any one person.
If you're talking to larger companies, thing FAANG, then they have a list price and discount levels that can act as incentives, levers or there are other options for inducement. Otherwise, you give the sales team the authority on go-to-market strategy while they are executing individual deals (tactics). Senior sales leaders can authorize some of those discounts and any special inducements or incentives have to be custom written into contracts by legal + deal desk, making them more time intensive and less desirable.