Hacker News Reader

> It is! So many people (both potential large customers and that long tail of small customers) will not click "contact a sales associate" and just leave when you won't say how much a thing costs.

Yes! Especially since 'contact us' can usually be translated as 'not financially viable for a private person' (or even small company).

Even if pricing is not easy to say (like for companies doing custom car mods etc.), at least a rough idea or example projects with their costs help to know whether you could reasonably afford something.

If SpaceX (https://www.spacex.com/rideshare/) can have public pricing so can everyone else.

My team has 7 people and my company has 100.000 employees.

My budget as that single team is not 'just getting the company credit card out and paying 5k / year for some services I wanna use'.

I'm pretty sure this type of practice is just stupid and we do see how much easier it is to just be allowed to click a VM on was, gcp and co in comparison to all of these 'contactnus for pricing shit'.

Lots of businesses just assume this is how their big features will be purchased. If it doesn't come with a sales rep and discovery call then it's not worth buying. This filters both ways.businesses that sell this way don't want to be bothered with anything less than a $certain amount$ and businesses that buy this way want the sales rep and sales engineering team to come in because the purchasing decision makers don't even know what they need or want.

Can you elaborate on what you'd like to see?

They're saying that your business practice of upfront list pricing should be the norm elsewhere. This series of comments is a critique of other businesses, comparing their 'contact us for pricing info' opacity unfavorably to your transparency.

Not op, but I'm sure, like many people, are saying they would like to see advertised, upfront pricing.

We clearly list our pricing on the app and our website and are the first to do that. On the website we display our pricing. When in the app you constantly see the pricing very clearly...if you desire a 5km2 area you'll see that price, 6km2 you'll see that price, etc etc. The fact that we've created an application that allows infinite variability on size of the image requested with multiple sensor types there is no way to list pricing for every scenario. I'd like to know more about what you'd like to see to make it simpler as we are always striving for perfection.

I think the chain of comments has been saying that they want others to do what you're doing, and complaining about the common practice of hiding costs, rather than any complaint about your pricing.

Got it, thanks IanCal

Yes, correct. I didn't realize you were the main OP. I very much appreciate the upfront pricing and have almost never given a "call for pricing" company a second thought.

I think one thing that was unclear to me was that the first thing you do in the app is select an area, and then you get the price for a new image, but no option to use an existing one (which is what I expected). Instead you have to go to a completely separate menu option to find the existing images.

It’d be nicer if the list of the existing images for an area just showed up in the same options dialog that allows me to choose the options for new images (probably as another choice next to medium or high resolution).

Good feedback, trying to condense all the info is tough but will obviously evolve. Pretty awesome to think this is our worst version and will only get better from here.

Yep. Until recently I worked for a profitable yet bootstrapped small business. Five people. No plans for insane hypergrowth, and in an industry where it’s very unlikely we’re going to be a billion-dollar company.

If I felt myself getting pulled into high-touch sales for a SaaS product, I’d move on to the next thing. I’m not an idiot. I know it’s not profitable for you to have salespeople talking to people with a budget like mine. So don’t pretend that you will. The worst thing you can do is actually follow through and contact me, because it tells me that your business model is such that I’m going to get screwed in a couple years time, so I’m just as uninterested.

This. I evaluate lots of software in my position. If you don’t post at least ballpark pricing on your public webpage and you do not have a feature I cannot live without I’m talking to one of your competitors that does. Every time.

Concur. This is so obvious to me I do not understand why not posting a price — no matter what it is — is still considered good business practice. Perhaps once upon a time before the internet but no longer.

One reason is that plenty of powerful people default to zero-sum thinking. If there's money involved, they would like most of it to be theirs. Long ago I read something from Philip Greenspun where he talked about Oracle's pricing strategy, and it went something like, "Take all of your money, and then another $50k/year for support."

Which reminds me of a quote from Brian Cantrill: "You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246

It’s not that they have a fixed price they’re not sharing with you. They want to estimate how much you’ll pay first - look at Crunchbase, etc.

I’m not saying it’s a good idea but there are plenty of smart cookies who seem to think it maximises revenue.

If you want to counteract, have a shitty little startup with no funding and ask for the quote for them.

I suspect it’s primarily a mix of three things. The first is price discrimination, like you mention. The second is wanting to have some control over the sales process (price anchoring, tempering sticker stock, etc.). The third is related to the second: focusing inbound sales efforts by subtly communicating that “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it” for a large chunk of price-sensitive customers.

And the 4th is once I see those sorts of sales tactics I know what kind of people run that company and I am not interested in associating with them. Principal matters.

A more positive spin would be that richer companies are subsidising poorer ones.

Why in the world would you try to put a positive spin on it? It's bad behaviour, and you should feel bad for engaging in it. It's greedy and dishonest. Pass.

anytime you hear "custom quote" it means a sales person is try to maximize his or her value out of you

When in fact the opposite should be true. How can I as a company maximize my value to you. This is the type of companies I choose to partner with.

its a backwards system and then when you combine sales teams that are commission based how can anyone realistically expect to get a fair price when a human's pay is based on getting as high a price as possible

I believe not giving you a fair price is the goal there. A fair price would mean leaving money on the table. Your money, which you probably should not have, especially when it's something they're helping you make.

Some businesses think of you from the perspective of partners. Others think of you from the perspective of farmers or ranchers, where they try to pen you in and extract what they want, but understand the necessity of at least some investment on their part. And then there are those who are more like poachers.

This isn't always true. Sometimes you want to stop large customers from performing naive cross-comparisons of price when the on-the-ground reality is more nuanced.

This can be price levers on individual features, security track record, non-obvious user patterns that deliver a lot of value, etc. You're given more opportunities to pitch the full value of your product in a way that engages the customer with their particular pain points.

Maybe we should still all use transparent pricing, but I don't think it's fair to say it's used to extract more cash (though some companies definitely do that).

That's exactly why I avoid those companies. If the price is hidden behind a quote, it means they're going to try to gouge you for every penny they can get away with.

classic https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...

That’s probably a valid point. I would liken that to car lots but most of them at least publicly post a starting price. I guess it’s no wonder why I instinctively steer clear.

Some products/service are really hard to quote upfront without knowing the customer's exact use case and needs. You don't want to scare everyone away with sticker shock but at the same time you don't want to mislead people into expecting a much lower price. Often this includes offering customers decent pre-sales support in the quoting process. Sometimes it's a sign they are willing to negotiate widely on price as well.

Yep. To me (and, I suspect, plenty of others) "call for pricing" = "call so one of our trained manipulators can figure out how to screw you out of as much money as possible".

100% agree, nobody wants to contact sales so I outlawed that. Easy decision

>> will not click "contact a sales associate" and just leave when you won't say how much a thing costs.

THIS!!

Having run small businesses in several technology industries, I cannot emphasize how much this is true.

I very well understand that pricing can be complex.

But if you cannot give me even an order of magnitude as to whether your prices are even remotely feasible for me or my customer's project, I likely don't have the time or motivation to find out.

Yes, I get it, you think your likelihood of sales is better if I talk to someone and they can pitch me on how wonderful your stuff is.

Bullshirt. Maybe one in 500 times is that true. You are wasting my time and yours.

And, no this is not a filter to weed out the small players. My small shops have done work for anything from individuals to the largest multinational corps and governments. If your product is a fit, I can get the budget. But putting in that kind of wall is just offputting.

This is very much like how the real estate industry used to treat the address of a property as a state secret, as if nothing is ever a 'drive-by', the sale will be lost if they can't talk with the customer, blah, blah, blah. Then the dam finally broke, and now they all put addresses and maps, and guess what? They save themselves tons of time because the buyers self-qualify! They check out the places themselves, and only call when it already looks like a good fit.

Sales and marketing types really can get stuck in naive wrong ideas for decades...

> I might be one of those long tail customers for SkyFi, my Dad's birthday is coming up and I think he'd love a print of a satellite photo of his cottage on the lake up north ...it needs to be better than Google Maps

It's not, it's drastically worse than Google Maps, not even comparable.

That was my use case as well, I bought images (at the highest offered resolution) of my house upstate and the place I got married, thinking they'd be nice little framed items, and they're completely unusable.

Google maps is probably 10-50x sharper. It's a confusing product. I guess there's a use case of tracking a something like how many warehouses your competitor has built, or avalanches, or forest fires, or all sorts of time sensitive things, but I feel like they could do a way better job of actually explaining what they are actually selling.

Google Maps uses aerial photos past a certain level of magnification, if it is available in a given area, even if it's still labelled as "satellite".

If you compare areas where there are no such photos - e.g. large natural parks - the hi-res samples on their website don't look any worse to me than Google.

Absolutely! Google uses aerial for popular locations (large cities).

We will get into aerial in the next few months.

(I am affiliated with SkyFi - CTO)

The pricing page on our website is just the start. If you visit the desktop or download the mobile app (https://www.skyfi.com/download-app), you will see that we have dynamic pricing in-app. As you change the size of your area of interest (AOI), the price immediately changes. We are 100% focused on the UX for the end-user and will work hard to keep the purchasing process seamless. User feedback like these conversations is helpful.

Is there no way to get a preview of the resolution and "look" of the image being processed? The preview is low resolution but could you unhide a random 100mx100m section to show it?

From the preview I wouldn't pay for what I could see. I work with GIS and there are lots of aerial photos with crisp resolution of details but the season or lighting that day or color processing makes it look like a "bad photo."

Yeah, that was my concern. I think this is probably fine for industrial use, where the question is "can I see the thing". But I have a large copy of this hung on my wall: https://www.over-view.com/shop/sflowangle#/

That's mainly an aesthetic choice, not a practical one, and the sample images would not give me any confidence that I'd be getting the kind of thing that, say, would make a frame-worthy gift for somebody.

Second this. Happy to pay for 5km2 although i'd probably crop out 1km2. But I'd love to be able to understand what size i'd be able to print that 1km2 at using 300dpi. I guess art prints aren't exactly the core use case for this though.

Round numbers: 0.5m per pixel at 300dpi is 150m per inch so a 1km box is 7 inches by 7 inches. My city website has aerial survey data that looks to be much higher resolution data so you could also try there.

I'm not going to download and install your app to discover pricing either. There's a fair chance you can't get me to install your app ever, and the more of your service is tied to it, the less likely I am to use your service at all.

Their website has similar functionality where you can highlight an area on the map and it immediately tells you how much the photo will cost, updating the price as you tweak options.

Doesn't seem to need a download: https://app.skyfi.com/explore

thats actually pretty good

This so much. If I'm evaluating half a dozen different possible options for a product I'm not going to strike up a relationship with every single salesperson just to get the damn BOM line. Especially if they can't even get you a price without generating a full up purchase order which takes 2-3 days for no good reason.

> photo as present

I looked into something similar. If the photo only needs to be somewhat recent I would recommend plane photography. My state does a yearly plane survey, so I used that. If you know anyone in geotech or environmental engineering, they can probably point you in the right direction.