Tell HN: Please let me just buy stuff without having to “Contact Sales” | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Please let me just buy stuff without having to “Contact Sales”

132 pointsrobbie-c82 comments

Context: I'm trying to buy an API for Text-To-Speech. There's a few that look promising but I can't really try them out without going through a sales guy first. All I'm going to tell them is that we want a short trial where I can check out the quality for myself in our specific use case.

It's frustrating that I need to wait for our calendars to align and to sit on a call to do this.

I don't need the sales pitch, it's an extremely straightforward concept, and I'm likely to choose whichever one lets me build an MVP the fastest.

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There are different sales models, each optimising for different outcomes: self-serve is the easiest way to get the first dollar, but it has trade-offs. If you're unwilling to talk to sales upfront, you're probably not going to go on to be a high value customer, and the platforms you're interested in have probably determined that self-serve customers are not their target audience (because of the trade-offs).

A big challenge with self-serve is the ability to accurately price without any prior context: there's a dance between service providers and service customers, where the service provider is trying to maximise revenue and the customer wants to pay the least possible. Selling to a human, after discussing their needs and budget, makes it much easier maximise revenue from that customer.

A good lesson to take from this experience is that just because you want a service, does not mean you're the target customer of every company selling that service. If you're unable to find the experience you need from one service provider, you should absolutely move on to the next -- nobody is going to take offence :)

That's a good way to frame this interaction. You write well, cheers

No. You spend more money when I get you on the phone.

Because it’s not usually engineers I’m taking to, it’s directors and managers.

If you’re a startup and I have enterprise pricing, I likely don’t prioritize you.

No. You spend more money when I get you on the phone.

I like how this response unapologetically lays bare a coarse reality of software.

Programmers only see steady paychecks; they don't appreciate where the money comes from.

I understand what you mean here, but in the case of companies that are selling a service the money is coming in because of the product. Marketing and Sales get customers in the door. It’s the price and its reliability that keep them handing over the money.

That said, obviously we’re all in this together, and the paychecks come because we’re all doing the work.

I'd take a 10x sales or marketer over a 10x programmer any time.

True, but... product managers also like to research and try things. There have been a few packages out there that I wanted my team to try, but I gave up on because I wasn't able to play with it first. I also then proceeded to share my negative view within my own org in favor of the option that did.

It's absolutely valid that you can focus your attention towards the juicy targets, but there are likely more apples than expected that will hit the ground.

Would you get a commission if you had a self serve platform?

Slack was self-serve. They famously said they didn't need sales people.

Then they sold to Enterprise, governments, and had to face compliance queries.

A very sales answer.

Makes sense, I'm a sales engineer whom specializes in security products.

You really cannot sell to govt without “sales”.

> No. You spend more money when I get you on the phone.

On the phone -> $0, as they're not going to call

Easy self-managed sign up -> $some, as this is what they're willing to do

I think this is considered an acceptable loss. This is a class of customer that they’re not interested in. They want people with lots of money they can throw their sales people at. If it’s just some lone developer or a bootstrapped startup, they feel like it’s not worth the time.

Whether or not that makes sense is another matter.

yeah but you are not the target audience. we dont a a self-managed sign up because none of our target customers have the capabilities to pay the prices with a credit card because their companies have purchasing departments that do this for them.

there are so many layers for these companies before they can buy anthing above a certain threshold its insane.

data privacy/compliance questions alone make this insanely difficult

But what about a self-managed quote? Even a ballpark estimate can be useful.

The flipside to this is, you, the seller, sees zero money from people who were tasked to "do a quick search for quotes and providers and let us know at the meeting tomorrow", and went away from your website simply thinking "ok this company doesn't even list a pricerange; move along".

I've lost count of the number of times this happened to me for moderate-to-large / organization-wide purchases.

Unless you somehow expect that a director never assigns a lackey at short notice, and always does this kind of research themselves, giving themselves oodles of time for a decision, because they enjoy the exhilirating experience of spending hours upon hours on the phone with salespeople.

There's probably a good chance of a non-trivial amount of survivorship bias going on before you even reach the tip of the iceberg that is the "I only end up talking to directors and managers" observation.

In most cases, they expect to see zero money from people who were tasked to "do a quick search for quotes" anyway, because they don't compete on price and someone who gets their junior to shortlist self service providers on the basis of the lowest cost and least effort to get a quote isn't remotely likely to be making a purchase strategic enough to consider their large up front setup fee for a custom trained model and months long integration process.

> The flipside to this is, you, the seller, sees zero money from people who were tasked to "do a quick search for quotes and providers and let us know at the meeting tomorrow", and went away from your website simply thinking "ok this company doesn't even list a pricerange; move along".

The people who look for quotes in organizations that are likely to want to be targeted by the company are themselves salespeople and business development employees, not developers, who know how "contact sales" and the sales pipeline in general work.

In other words, it is mutual self selection that benefits both parties. All others outside of that range need not apply.

> The people who look for quotes in organizations that are likely to want to be targeted by the company are themselves salespeople and business development employees, not developers

As a developer, I've been tasked with doing this probably two dozen times in my career at various companies. It's not that rare. And yes, having to talk to a salesperson to get an idea of the cost gets that offering crossed off my list immediately.

Those companies have lost fairly large sales because of the practice.

Not as many sales as devs would like to believe, and likely are net positive by not underselling with fixed prices.

Its more like sales/sales-adjacent people sell and buy from other sales/sales-adjacent people, and the added price on top of what the actual product is worth is what keeps everyone who is sales/sales-adjacent employed.

In my (limited) experience the sales team often can’t answer the questions I have about their product anyway. So the first call is a reiteration of my needs that I specified in email. Then we schedule a second call with a more senior salesperson who also can’t answer it. So we have a third call with an engineer to talk about one part of my use case, where I start my explanation over from scratch.

With GitLab, the sales team kept trying to show me demos of their product I already know. For months they kept trying to steer the conversation towards CI/CD when I had a completely different topic I wanted to focus on.

I went through a similar byzantine process years ago when vetting a customer-data platform. Our CEO was an acquaintance of someone at Blueconic, so they had to be in the running. They were super-opaque -- unwilling to even give me a range of prices after multiple calls, even after giving them reams of data that represented the traffic/usage we could expect. They were constantly angling to get more senior executives roped into calls and to show demos of features we'd never use. They were also super-reluctant to give us names of references and wanted to moderate such a call. We asked for 3 references and they gave us 1, like David Brent in The UK Office, when his boss asked him for 5 things he did to cut costs and he said "I'll give you 3, and if you want 2 more I'll do that." The other companies were better but still took real effort to extract information. We ended up going with Segment.

I'm sometimes responsible for comparing and choosing a service we gonna implement in a software we develop (let's say an API to do something). Top reasons why I reject a prospective service includes "contact sales" pricing, API documentation not being public or not in English and no EU data residency nor EU hosting provider.

Sure, if I eliminate other choices for this thing and you're the only one left I'm gonna ask a non-technical person in my company to cut through the bullshit and contact sales, to get me what I want, but otherwise, if there are other good choices, you are gonna miss my business.

How to ruin a SaaS company

> Sell "one size fits all" usage scaled billing

> Don't hire a sales team

> Large companies won't do business with you since they cant negotiate or engage with a sales team to make sure the product fits for them

> A thousand small users sign up and pay 1$ per month before credit card and merchant fees, misuse the product and want a refund, and throw tens of thousands of support requests at you

You now have a less than worthless sales model.

Whenever I run into 'Contact Sales', I translate that into 'We have hired unemployed used car salesmen. They assure us they can con you out of more money if they get a chance to talk to you.'

I realize it might not be a fair assessment, but it is always where my brain goes. And then I move on, to a competitor. I only contact sales if you are literally the ONLY one with what I need. But that is rare.

"Contact Sales" is annoying to see, but for a small company I think it's a good sign. It means they're focusing on their product, not the automation of sales. They'd rather talk directly to interested customers, rather than scale and automate the sales pipeline for "mass-adoption".

Think of the alternative, a startup focuses on scaling their signup/payment flow, and have to sacrifice time-to-market and reduce the amount of time they're actually talking to customers and working on the product...

> It means they're focusing on their product, not the automation of sales.

To me it means they don't understand their own product or customers, since they can't list a price for the typical use case.

I'm the CTO of a bootstrapped SaaS product targeting the higher education market. We don't list a price on the website because there are many variables that affect the final price. Every school has their single-sign-on system, for example. There are obviously several popular options, but there's also a whole host of obscure options. Every university IT department has their own preferences about how the integration will go. That very much changes how time-consuming the implementation will be for our company, and thus affects the price. There's no way to know this until we talk about what kind of integration the school wants.

We also vary the price based on school size. Huge research-1 level schools pay more than tiny public liberal arts schools -- and rightly so. The big schools have more funding and more spare cash. They also have bigger, more complicated implementations since they have 50+ thousand students and hundreds of faculty. The size of the school also feeds into how expensive the customer is going to be to service, and thus affects our pricing.

How do I put all that into a single price on the website?

> The big schools have more funding and more spare cash.

There you go. Honest businesses don't make their prices with regards to how much "spare cash" their client might have.

> How do I put all that into a single price on the website?

You divide it into parts that can be priced. If there is a bespoke part you put an hourly rate for that implementation, or daily rate, or any way of counting the rate that suits you.

You can use the projects you have finished to publish examples for future potential clients, where they can compare a little bit and get a rough idea of what it would cost them.

Just getting any kind of price information out there is much better than nothing, because then a potential client knows if it's within their range. You also avoid people who cannot afford your product.

> Honest businesses don't make their prices with regards to how much "spare cash" their client might have.

Yes they do. This is indeed how supply and demand works, companies price what the market is willing to pay, it's just that in this case, the market is a clientele of 1.

Most consumers agree price discrimination (charging two residents of the same town different prices) is dishonest.

Enterprise deals are not the same as consumer deals. Even with consumer deals, I wouldn't expect a consultant to charge a flat fee for someone, it all depends on their needs. If the customer needs more in depth support, it makes sense that the consultant charge more. So too with enterprise deals.

You can come up with all manner of scenarios consistent with your business ethics. I'm sure I'd agree with them.

I just wanted to back GGGP's judgment of vendors who adjust pricing according to customer pocket depth. While I'm at it, your claim that individuals are markets unto themselves is also risible.

All I'm saying is, if all else were equal between a 5 million and a 500 million dollar company, it might not be very ethical to charge them differently. But the point is all else is not equal, they both might have vastly different needs, so it makes sense to charge them according to those needs, where the larger one likely has more complex and thus more expensive needs. Again, it's the same as a plumber charging different prices for a big house versus a small house, based on complexity.

I'd argue it's two different products with very different levels of support effort. Larger customers require much more time/effort than smaller customers. I could list an hourly rate, sure, but most customers don't even know where to begin with estimating how many consulting hours they'd need. I'd hate to lose a customer because they over-estimate the hours and think they can't afford it, or have them underestimate and be shocked later. Every customer is unique and there's no useful way to break it down into a pricing chart.

Let's say we charge everyone the "big customer" rate.. The smaller customers couldn't afford it. If we charged everyone the "small customer" rate, we'd put ourselves out of business by spending far too time on the big customers while not making enough revenue to cover the costs of serving the larger customers. If we're practical about it, the smaller customers just don't have budgets as large as the larger customers. If we want the smaller customers to buy in, we have to reduce the price to something that fits their budget.

I sympathize with big customers subsidizing small customers. That premise applies to all percentage-based sales commission structures. It's not clear whether showing a $1M mansion is any more work than showing a $100k bungalow (certainly not 10X as much), but realtors obviously much prefer the former, and will grudgingly take on the latter for portfolio reasons.

Or they perfectly do understand who their customers are, they're simply not you or me or really any other developer.

Then put out some kind of price there, so that unworthy clients know it's out of their range! Then you don't have to waste your time with them.

They already don't waste time with them, why do they have any need to do further?

If a business doesn't publish a price, then people will have to contact them to find out they can't afford it. This wastes the time of the person having to tell this to the unwanted customers.

As OP notes, people who are not in their target market select themselves out since they do not see the value of contacting sales (while those who are enterprise are likely to be in the target market have no problem contacting sales). Thus no time is wasted. At worst, they have false negatives instead of false positives, but that can be ameliorate with outbound sales rather than waiting for people to contact them inbound.

How can we not understand each other? If a business doesn't put out a price, they will be contacted by people who can't afford the price - since you have to contact sales to get a clue. The wast majority of businesses who don't publish a price are not serving enterprise clients.

> they will be contacted by people who can't afford the price

Not really. Some people will, sure, but most people will assume they can't afford it (which, if they have to ask, are correct).

> The wast majority of businesses who don't publish a price are not serving enterprise clients.

Where are you getting this information? The reason to expend time and energy with salespeople doing personal demo calls is to get enterprise clients, otherwise it's a waste to do all of that for someone paying a 100 bucks a month.

I understand from your replies that you are a person who is always right, and that's OK. I'll answer your question and then let it be:

> Where are you getting this information?

For every business big enough to serve enterprise, there are hundreds of small businesses who serve the general public. It's common that they don't list their prices.

> I understand from your replies that you are a person who is always right, and that's OK

Not really me wanting to be right, I gave you a few examples of people self selecting out of the target market while you haven't really given me any evidence for your statement, that's all I'm saying.

> It's common that they don't list their prices.

Could you provide an example? I usually only see those who are targeting enterprise to have wording about contacting sales. At the very most I'll see startups have pricing tiers and the last tier is called Enterprise and the button says contact sales.

An example: Recently I looked for a small storage unit. All facilities in the local area offering spaces, of any size from small lockers up, were clearly targeting consumers looking to store household goods.

All of those consumer-targwttimg businesses without exception had "contact sales to get a quote".

I was expecting to face a sleazy upsell pitch, but all of those I contacted had a simple fixed price list covering each unit size after you contacted sales. It was just a way to force the prospective customer to call up first, amd to avoid publishing their price list.

The time spent on calls was annoying because I was in a hurry while comparison shopping, but there wasn't any upsell pitch. There was a surprising amount of information given by the vendors on those calls which ruled out their facility from being useful, though. Things they should really have included in the FAQs on their websites. Eg "24x7 access" on the website banners meaning."sorry 24x7 is not offered at the unit in your town because it's in a town centre, access is 9 to 4:30 only" after you called, if you remembered to ask

> It means they're focusing on their product, not the automation of sales.

I disagree. It makes me think that they're focusing on the hard sell rather than the quality of their product.

Why is this a bad thing? It serves as a litmus test for the kind of service you can expect after the purchase.

I'm grateful for these companies putting it out there ahead of time.

OP said:

> It's frustrating that I need to wait for our calendars to align and to sit on a call to do this.

It is 2023, there should be a self serve tier for all SaaS products. A call sales only service smells like an MVP to me.

A "call sales only" service can reflect that the company hasn't had time to build a signup flow, or it can reflect a reasoned decision that a large number of low-usage customers won't be helpful for the bottom line. Depending on your infrastructure and the level of support you want to offer, it's easy for small customers to cost more money than you'll ever make from them.

You could charge more if that's the concern

B2B pricing models are typically artifical constructs only weakly related to the costs of providing the service. If you're targeting medium to large clients processing sensitive data, for example, you might start off by just provisioning a VM for each customer while still charging per API call. The price that you want to charge your target audience (or at least your starting point for negotiations with them) will end up much lower than what you'd need to make money off the hobbyist making 20 calls a month.

I wouldn't say this is an unsolvable problem. Sometimes you can build the product in a way that better aligns with your desired pricing model, and other times you can set up some implicit price discrimination in a way that feels more honest than scammy. But is that where your company's limited time and effort is best spent? Often the answer is no.

Who is paying for that?

Providing self service tier is not free for the company.

You still get support tickets from free tier users. It is also not only building self service flow but maintaining it updating code/documentation.

Let alone that it is common knowledge that free users are the worst.

Who said to provide service for free? The OP didn't even hint about that, in fact from reading the title it seems that they are willing to shove money if there were clear pricing.

Fair enough Let’s rephrase it.

Not free but self service paid - who is going to sign up for 5k starting fee and then 1k/month?

That is still fairly low for enterprise tier.

What people expect is self service tier $100 a month or less. Which by corporate standards is essentially free tier.

When we wanted for our company get specialist from one vendor that has free tier they quoted $5k/day.

My main point still stands.

Yes depends on the business model.

For some 10k * $100/m customer might be of interest, if there is little support required. I think for a simple "API" type service this could work.

For others they want 100 * $10k/m and they are offering a rich service with in depth support.

A middle ground is provide indicative pricing for enterprise plans, provide documentation so the end users can decide if this will work for them before contacting sales.

Your main point does not stand at all. There are tons of companies selling expensive products and services while listing their prices out in the open.

I understand your concern and I share your frustration. I have send emails a few times where I'm clear about my budget and sales people tend to share the minimum commitment they expect, there isn't much lost by trying.

Being on the other side of the table (running a SaaS requiring a call scheduled), I have do this because my SaaS its in an early stage, the call allows me to understand the customer needs and make a proposal when we are a good fit. In this particular case, it is hard to get a quote when I don't know the necessary customization that could be required.

The call is a friction point that I'm trying to avoid by communicating example integrations and its prices in the landing page, still, making everything clear hasn't been simple.

In short, asking by email could be a good idea.

When I’m qualifying a new product and I see “contact for pricing” that company goes to the bottom of my list. I literally allow their competitors to win before I even look at them.

We don’t need to beg people to behave properly. We simply ignore them when they don’t. They can go flail and fail all day.

100%

Sometimes I need a solution in hours. And when I “contact sales” it’s days or more before I get and email or call back. My time is worth more than your product in almost every case.

In such an actively developed area like TTS/ASR there is high chance that custom solution would fit your needs much better. The feature set of TTS is actually pretty large and hard to combine in a single ML model. No free lunch you know.

For example if you look for singing voice, they might suggest you an adapted model that is good specifically for singing.

The testing process is also not very straight, you need to understand what to test and how to test properly. For example, some of their voices might be better for questions, some for news.

You'd better talk to them.

It's a mature market; Capterra lists 53 solutions and has pricing on many of them. https://www.capterra.com/text-to-speech-software/

What is your budget? It's likely a situation of "if you have to ask, you cannot afford it."

The opportunity cost for a larger firm to serve a startup may exceed the likely three year revenue you can offer.

It's strange to see the venomous and outright hostile responses OP is getting, when he is completely right.

"Contact sales" is a practice seen everywhere, not only from those serving large enterprises. A lot of small time and B2C websites do the "Contact sales" thing, so all the arguments here that OP is unimportant as a customer falls completely flat. There are only two reasons to not post any price:

1. You don't understand your own business and have to bring out the calculator and spreadsheet in order to know what price to offer a customer.

2. You're trying to rip off the customer.

If huge companies like Stripe can list a price, then you can too. But one of the reasons above stop you. I've seen exactly how these "Contact sales" people operate in their in-person meetings and it's always the same: A lot of sales tricks to try to sell an underperforming product for an extremely bloated price. Which of course can work if the person responsible for the purchase is not the business owner and can be convinced by wining and dining, getting a prostitute or getting a bribe. But those times are rapidly coming to an end.

Putting a price out there means any potential customer can know your price range before entering in contact to discuss special solutions. In my field of work most competitors advertise in the vein of "We can make the perfect solution for you, just contact sales" and have no price published. We have several ready made solutions with clear pricing as well as invitations to contact sales for special solutions. Guess which model actually works?

I also believe this is an age thing. People below a certain age know that no listed price means it is always a fraud. They will instantly discard such companies.

> People below a certain age know that no listed price means it is always a fraud. They will instantly discard such companies.

I'm a graybeard, and I think this way as well. Or, even if it's not a fraud, having no listed price means, at the very least, that I'll have to talk to a salesperson -- which is to be avoided as much as possible.

In the case of software and other anything digital, I'm in favour of not using this practice. If it were something physical/analog, like bespoke furniture made in Maine or hand crafted leather works then it would make sense to use this practice. I'm disappointed whenever practices that had reasoning are blindly practiced like this.

That is good first 'sign' of companies to avoid.

Either they have plain and simple pricing or its just a bullshit dance with sales team.

Choose wisely.

Often the product is not worth the dance ...

The whole point of "Contact sales" is for the sales team to figure out how much you're willing to spend on their service, and to extract that amount from you. It is frustrating for you, but that's how their business is making majority of their money, so they won't give it up.

I recently had this issue multiple times. I’m certainly not against Contact Sales as an option, because of course there can be a special case/need which needs discussion. However, it would have saved me and the SaaS provider multiple calls just to find out where the price is. Is it less than 100$, 500$ or 5k+ a month. If I knew, that even a basic package is 5k+ it would not be a fit. If I knew, it’s less that 500$ I’d be interested to start talking as it’s in a reasonable budget. In this specific case, it was even more frustrating, as I already started to use the product through a free account with 3 credits - when I used them, I was not able to buy new credit but had to start talking to sales…

It's not just a profit maximization strategy; there are many reasons why a business may want to vet their customers. (compliance, fraud prevention, reputation management, etc)

If there's a simple product that costs $35/month and does one single function, then it is stupid to contact sales.

However, if it is a complex sale with multiple optional parts that require custom solutions, then you need to talk to a salesperson.

I totally agree with you if it is a simple product.

it would be funny if in this case the sales call happened and at the end you were like “alright, can i hear a demo” and they go “this WAS the demo”

Or at least put a price range. There are so many companies I outright blocked because they refused to tell me the price of their product until after their lackluster showcase.

We ended up remaking our own solution for one of them and open sourcing the code because development was 10x (maybe even 100x) cheaper than purchasing at their predatory pricing schemas.

The reason for that isn't so much that they are running a "if you have to ask..." strategy (though it's definitely one of the reasons)

it's more that every sale is a complex sale that makes it difficult or lossy to advertise a flat rate.

That or the price is a competitive advantage and they are trying to mitigate a race to the bottom

You are not the target market. The target market expects to and does not hesitate to contact sales.

Nobody is obligated or even likely to profit from giving you their software because you as a complete unqualified and unaffiliated stranger "just want to try it out"

Does the MVP require high quality TTS? I wonder how good the numerous free TTS packages are, at least for getting started. (eSpeak, Festival, Mozilla TTS, etc.)

I'd love to know which service you settle with, facing the same topic (tts)

They probably want to sell you the highest possible package.

There it is right there. I'm not saying it's correct to do this, but this is the long and short of what's going on here. To get the big fish you have to sometimes sell at cost, because their name draws in the small orbiter fish who want to be big fish some day. If every small fish started demanding big fish rates, the entire thing stops. In a way this is emblematic of class privilege and wealth disparity issues at the moment.

Many of these want to know your revenue and then make a sales proposal based on your total revenue. This is frustrating for companies where software is a tiny proportion of the products/services. Example: recently tried to license software that wanted 1% of our sales when software makes up 0.003% of our sales by volume. I now don't even try to negotiate with these types of folks.

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