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Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

(not Bryan, not actively part of the decision to put prices on the website or not, just my own take.)

Different audiences have different expectations. In the place we are, that is, enterprise sales, the expectation is not that you can go to a website, get a price, and click a button. The expectation is that the two organizations will communicate over a period of time ("the sales cycle") to work through everything that goes into a deal, and eventually come to an agreement or not. This includes so many variables that putting the price on the website wouldn't make sense, as you're never going to end up at that exact price.

I used to find this attitude frustrating, as an engineer, but the longer I have been a professional, and worked at various organizations, the more I come around to that being a good thing, not a bad thing.

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As someone that often has limited time to research viable options to present to leadership, I expect to be able to negotiate pricing at the enterprise level if we want to move forward. What's deeply frustrating that keeps me from sometimes mentioning an option is having no idea what the rough order of magnitude pricing is. Some kind of pricing is deeply appreciated.

If I don't know whether something will fit within the approximate budget for the project and can't quickly get an idea from other research I'm not going to mention it as an option. I'm used to spending about a million per rack but that's for a complete ESX cluster with storage and networking, if I have no idea how alternatives stack up against that it's hard to put it on the table.

You are right that this sort of sales style has its downsides. I am also not saying there's no value in having something on the page, or that Oxide is always going to be this way. I am just talking about why it is a norm in many parts of the B2B world.

I will echo this. A product with no pricing information will often just get no further exploration, especially if a competitor does have it. Don't underestimate the overhead of just having to talk sales before you have a price.

I’m surprised there is anything that you can spend a million dollars on where nearly all the alternatives aren’t “please contact sales”. And even if there was, you couldn’t do any real analysis without contacting sales, because any displayed price would be highly negotiable.

Where I’m frustrated by this attitude is when I just want to buy 10 seats of something and it doesn’t have a price, not at the seven digit level.

All I really want to know is "ballpark" - are we talking four, five, ten figures?

I feel bad burning salesman time for a solution that is way out of our range, but I can't learn that until after a meeting or two.

I hear you, but I can assure you that this comes with the territory for sales people. Qualifying leads is part of the job.

Oxide is offering you radically different -better- terms. The price they mean to charge will almost be based around what they need to a) fund more development, b) grow, and probably also relate to what their competition charge. The actual price you would actually negotiate surely depends on other factors, like how badly you want those better terms. If the better terms aren't enough to make you talk to them about pricing, then Oxide surely isn't for you.

It's between a half million and a million.

If the price isn't listed, I always take it as a sign that nobody is buying it for price reasons ("if you have to ask, you can't afford it"). Outside of the blog, I don't even see a claim that it's cheaper so that's consistent.

That is understandable, but you would be mistaken.

That quote (which may not even have been said by J.P. Morgan) is talking about luxury consumer goods, which is a completely different market than business to business sales.

I wonder how many startups are overpaying for things like cloud because they are using consumer thinking instead of business thinking.

A huge number. I do a lot of due diligence of companies, and the over engineering on the cloud and costs have to be seen to believed. A common theme now is people use lambdas and step functions in replace of function calls. So a page load or transaction may involve two dozen serial lambda invocations. It is madness.

By way of contrast, a payments provider we explored had four moderate sized boxes running everything. They were about six years old and fully depreciated, but more than adequate to run millions of transactions through a month.

"If you have to ask, you probably can't fit it in your house."

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