Show HN: We built PriceLevel to find out what companies pay for SaaS | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: We built PriceLevel to find out what companies pay for SaaS

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532 pointscluo21176 comments

Hey HN! Christine and Steven here. As a PM and engineer, we’ve both evaluated and purchased a lot of software. One of the biggest frustrations was figuring out how much it would cost us without having to go through the sales process. When we did have a quote, we had no idea if we were getting a good deal or ripped off.

We built a site where you can see what other companies are actually paying for SaaS and enterprise software. Buyers contribute prices via quotes, pricing proposals, and other documentation to ensure quality.

We unlocked Talkdesk for Show HN users so that you can use the product without needing to sign in or upgrade. Check it out at https://www.pricelevel.com/showhn. Would love to hear any feedback, thank you!

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Love this! As a consumer, there's nothing like open pricing.

However, as a provider I can totally see a situation where I (proverbially, I'm not in this business) sue you for disclosing what amounts to a trade secret (depending on what's in the fine print) and compel you to give up all documents so I can go after my loose-lipped client too.

I hope you've got your legal bases covered

Is there precedent that points in either direction that pricing details are considered a trade secret (or whatever the legally enforceable version of that is)?

I've signed and written quotes that have those provisions. What the legal standing is, I can't comment on because it never came to that.

This is with the obvious caveat that public tenders are the exception, but only after it's awarded

Sure. Broadly, a trade secret under state and federal law is "information that derives independent economic value from not being generally known to the public or people who can obtain economic value from it and is the subject of efforts to maintain its secrecy that are reasonable under the circumstances." Price lists could clearly fall under this definition, and they do! Here's an 8th circuit case where the plaintiff "adequately allege[d] that the information that was purportedly misappropriated— ... pricing information ... qualifies as trade secret[]." Ahern Rentals, 59 F.4th 948 (2023).

There's precedent that points in both directions. There was a fair amount of research when there was a push for transparency in hospital pricing for services in the US. One piece of research: https://portal.ct.gov/-/media/OHS/Healthcare-Cabinet/2021-Me...

You'll see there's some cited court cases that supported pricing as a trade secret, and some that held it was not.

It seems to be still pretty muddy legally.

Loving this as well from the point of view of a small saas provider who has no idea what typical enterprise contract runs for.

I can totally see some uninformed staff member contributing what they're paying for things, and landing their employer in deep, deep, trouble with their suppliers.

I've found in competitive price analysis there's some companies that do very, very, well at hiding their pricing. If they've worked that hard, that long, to protect/hide pricing they're not going to take it lying down.

Pricing isn’t a trade secret.

I'm not a lawyer, but it seems possible that an enterprise software licensing agreement could contain a non-disclosure agreement or confidentiality clause.

Not making a value judgement and happy to be corrected if this is not a thing.

Sounds like something the FTC should investigate.

What are they going to investigate?

The FTC is going to render contractual terms negotiated in good faith between well-represented and sophisticated commercial buyers “just because”?

If a big buyer wants better terms, the seller might give it to them under the condition the pricing info isn’t leaked, spoiling the rest of their market. Otherwise they don’t give it. So the buyer agrees to confidentiality to get the best terms. There’s zero chance the FTC gets in the middle of this kind of negotiation.

One might be able to argue that by keeping the pricing secret the big buyer is colluding with the seller to give the seller an advantage in in negotiating prices with other buyers, which could include competitors of the big buyer.

I think that would be unlikely to go anywhere with the current FTC though.

> The FTC is going to render contractual terms negotiated in good faith between well-represented and sophisticated commercial buyers “just because”?

Because without price transparency, markets do not work (microecon 101, prices are the signals from which supply and demand curve movements are determined). How can participants in a society determine where to allocate supply of resources without being able to see prices?

And making markets work more efficiently should surely be in the purview of the Federal Trade Commission.

but then that's a breach of an NDA which is not the same as sharing a quote-unquote "trade secret"

Best you consult a lawyer on the subject first. Trade secrets can certainly include "Pricing strategies and information" (1)

(1) https://www.lplegal.com/content/what-are-trade-secrets-and-h...

Pricing strategy isn't the same thing as a price you gave a client.

prices aren't a trade secret and difficult to enforce even if its covered under an NDA

"prices aren't a trade secret"

Is there a basis for this in recent case law? And how difficult would it be to enforce against a 3rd party actively publishing pricing, and therefore competitive, strategy?

Nope I'm not staying they should shut down or they will get sued, but they should do the sensible thing and talk to a good lawyer

there hasn't been any caselaw from my knowledge where they went after a customer for revealing the price of a software license

prices wouldn't be enforceable because knowing how much you charge isn't revealing anything proprietary (because you have to tell your customers in order to get them to make a decision).

Also not exactly possible to expect confidentiality around prices because your banks and their staff will see it..

Just to be clear, we both agree we're not lawyers

But I can argue that pricing is part of my strategy and revealing pricing information in cases where I explicitly forbade it is potentially damaging because it allows a competitor to undercut me. I'd be surprised if they do go after a client, but my concern for these guys is they are not a client. They are an aggregator of this information. If any of these quotes were given with the caveat that pricing should not be shared, then a named company who's on the pricier side might have a good leg to stand on arguing this site damaged their business with what amounts to a trade secret (pricing strategy). At three very least or could result in a letter and headaches. Asking for who gave the information is something I would totally see too, especially if this was a client who jumped ship, if anything else just as a scare tactic/revenge

also not a lawyer, but unless your contract includes specific confidentiality around the price, I don't think disclosing it is an issue. it will be very, very hard to argue it's a trade secret because it is not, in fact, a secret

> it allows a competitor to undercut me

So, allows them to compete with you...

IANAL, and don't know how the law actually applies to this, but prohibiting customers or potential customers from disclosing price information clearly seems anti-competitive to me. And in some ways it is even worse than giving you an advantage for you over your competitors, if all your competitors also keep pricing a trade secret. In that case it gives you and your "competitors" an advantage against the customer, because the customer can't effectively compare prices, at least without expending considerable effort, which can result in the customer paying more. Especially for smaller companies with less negotiating power.

> Also not exactly possible to expect confidentiality around prices because your banks and their staff will see it..

There's a big difference between seeing data in the course of your job, and being legally able to share it!

By default you’re legally able to share it. It’s your data, you’re telling someone how much you paid for something.

Something can’t be a trade secret if it’s not a secret at all, and if you’re the seller, and the information is a description of something someone else did (ie how much the buyer paid) then it’s not your secret to defend.

Not a lawyer either, but I think there is a more obvious angle to this: publicly traded companies can be audited, publish costs to investors, list their creditors and amount when going bankrupt, ask for tax rebates by declaring their expenses etc. In many circumstances their money flow needs to be transparent.

Not being allowed to expose the buying price of a service would go against many of these procedures/obligations.

We could look at it the same way disclosing one's salary can't be illegal: how do you then apply for a loan for instance ?

They totally can be. There's plenty of case law on it.

Source: I'm a 3L about to graduate with an IP specialization and got an award for being the best student in my trade secret law class.

can you share some?

Here's 4 from the first page of results on WestLaw:

- Ahern Rentals, 59 F.4th 948 (2023)

- Wilmington Star-News, 125 N.C. App. 174 (1997)

- Ingram, 260 Md. App. 122 (2023)

- Intertek Testing Servs., 443 F. Supp. 3d 303 (2020)

The first one is obviously distinguishable. It’s an action against competitors.

I’ll save myself the trouble of doing your research for you and ask if any of these involved a fact pattern where customers of a service sharing price info with each other is considered a trade secret.

Here’s a hint: if I am the customer and I am describing something that I myself did, specifically the outcome of a business decision I made on how much to pay, that’s not someone else’s trade secret.

A customer can misappropriate a vendor’s trade secret and price lists can be trade secrets. As a general matter these propositions easily fall within the relevant laws (UTSA, DTSA, NY common law) and there are plenty of cases around the country supporting that. If you have a different opinion, all I can say is that I believe you’d find out in court that you’re wrong.

Right but something that I do isn’t your secret. It can’t be in an arms length customer/vendor relationship.

You can make an argument that internal documents of a vendor are trade secrets, maybe. But you can’t say that a piece of information in the record of MY company, namely how much I decided to pay for their software, is a trade secret that belongs to someone else.

You’re learning how to be a lawyer quickly. It’s really common for attorneys to cite cases where the fact pattern doesn’t line up at all and hope nobody reads them. But if you are sure there is good precedent for this specific point then post it. I doubt that’s the case for the obvious reasons I outlined above.

Don’t patronize me.

You’re basically arguing that the act of purchasing renders the NDA void. Good luck with that.

Have you ever read an NDA? They usually go something like this:

For purposes of this Agreement, "Confidential Information" shall include any information, material, data, or know-how, including trade secrets and proprietary information, that is not generally known to the public and that is disclosed, either written or orally, to be or appears to a reasonable person to be proprietary or confidential.

The price that my company paid to purchase someone else's software was not "disclosed" to me. I created the information myself, when I made the decision to purchase it. The company didn't convey, transmit, or pass the information to me. My act of deciding to purchase the software created the information, which did not exist prior to my purchase decision, and it's information about me and my company's actions and by definition can't be someone else's proprietary data.

looking at the third one it does seem like pricing did fall under confidential data but that was after the database with those info was directly accessed

> Trial court did not err in finding the plaintiff took reasonable steps under the circumstances to maintain the secrecy of its trade secrets, including internal customer and pricing information, as required by MUTSA, CL § 11-1201(e)(2), where the plaintiff restricted access to the information on a company database; an employee handbook prohibited employees from removing sensitive categories of information

This seems very different from me getting a quote from you and then at a bar saying yeah XYZ enterprise plan costs $42,000/year

If the price list is provided under NDA, that could certainly be a reasonable effort to maintain its secrecy. It should be unsurprising that NDAs are canonical examples of such efforts. The fact that any given case may be distinguishable on some issue from our hypothetical fact pattern doesn’t mean much.

Just to let you know this kind of pricing information is available and given out during F500 SaaS deals.

Our microsoft reseller was using pricing and contract info on a deal he closed last week to assure us he would and could get us a similar deal.

Gartner will literally cutthtoat re-negotiate any large contract you have, using pricing data they have gathered from their members.

Call them up tomorrow, tell them your current cost for Splunk, they will tell you exactly how much you can save.

So this type of thing is not illegal and not even frowned upon for the big players.

Once you are big enough to have a procurement department this isn't just not frowned upon it's expected and very much "part of the game".

I personally hate it but it's just how the game is played and it's why all enterprise software has stupidly high advertised prices so they can give "90% discounts" and let people think that is a good deal when it is ultimately just the real price that all the big players are getting anyway.

When I worked at BEA (which I think published its prices), the steep discounts on a crazy high price actually had a clever reason — evidently the sales team could discount the list price pretty freely, but they were forbidden to discount the yearly support and maintenance fees. Sorta subscription pricing before it was cool.

Support & maintenance have radically lower margins than software licenses. Without discounting rules, sales can craft deals that lose the company money.

My practical experience with vendor negotiations is you ask for a discount and talk to them honestly and make the sales person have a good time with you and you don't need to play hardball, say you have some secret information or other crap. I have seen many contracts negotiated by a regular engineering manager and by "proper" procurement people, and the outcome is clear that hardball negotiations end up in worse outcomes than just being a nice person and speaking plainly.

There's a difference between 'a company negotiates on behalf of a number of clients and individuals happen to get a feeling for ballpark figures' verses publishing the exact figures of every deal on the internet.

I’m not sure you can sue to block price signals and that seems blatantly anti competitive. Also other services provide this type of intelligence already, like Vendr, Sastrify, Torii, etc.

Most of the quotes I get have clauses about not disclosing them to others. Prices may be okay but the entire quote can include drawings, specific item information, etc.

I had to get a lot of quotes and talking to legal is painful.

Price being a trade secret and legal fears for telling people a price number shows how far we are from a free market society.

This is ridiculous.

If there's one piece of information that is public by nature in a free market is price, folks.

We should bash on any business that tries to manipulate the legal system to destroy price publicity. They should be the ones in fear.

> If there's one piece of information that is public by nature in a free market is price, folks.

The whole concept of a market does not work without price transparency. The more price transparency, the more efficient the market.

Prices aren't trade secrets.

There is no scenario where pricing information can legitimately be described as a trade secret.

Sure you may be able to find some unscrupulous attorney who will make the argument that you charging $5 for one thing and $6 for another is somehow a "trade secret" so they can keep on billing, but that's only "legitimate" in the sense that a dictator is legitimate because they hold power. Price transparency and discoverability is a bedrock tenant of free market capitalism and any market to the contrary should be viewed as a direct attack on the free market. It's about as un-American a thing as you can get.

> However, as a provider I can totally see a situation where I (proverbially, I'm not in this business) sue you for disclosing what amounts to a trade secret (depending on what's in the fine print) and compel you to give up all documents so I can go after my loose-lipped client too.

I don't see this holding in court aside from the company needing to remove that info from the site.

You are not beholden to NDA you have not signed, and it woudld be employee that shared it breaking any agreements, not the company that then shared it.

As a buyer, it's definitely nice to have more data on this. Pricing can be very opaque and sometimes I just want to know the ballpark to know if it's even worth exploring. Annoying to spend 30 minutes on a call to get that when you could have it in 2 seconds.

As an operator, I know a lot of SaaS agreements include language saying the customer will protect the vendor's confidential data including information about pricing. I doubt it's legal in the majority of the time for buyers to share this data. And if the buyer is sharing confidential data with you, you're likely taking on risk by sharing it publicly, even in aggregate form.

You could add something saying that the buyer agrees that they have the legal rights to share the information with you, to protect yourself. But at some point you should know that the majority of the time, even if that box is checked, they don't.

The buyer is already sharing that information with their bank, so the confidentiality is already broken :)

Banks with business accounts is who this company should partner with. Sidesteps any contractual remedies a seller might attempt. Opt in of course for the customer.

Banks don't know the terms of the contract, nor the customer specifics, usually.

Sure, they get some good insight, but they don't know how many seats, what level of support, etc etc. They just see a transaction $X from company A -> company B.

Isn't this like saying that if you fulfill your prescription at a pharmacy, your medical data is open?

I think you should fuzz the prices and other specifics like the number of seats a bit for privacy.

For even more privacy you could show faceted aggregates with error bars instead of individual accounts once your samples are big enough.

That's a fair point. Just to make sure I understand, when you say fuzz - do you mean round up or down so it's a nice whole number?

I would show an interval that's within 5% or whatever, but use the same intervals for all accounts otherwise people will be able to deduce the original number by calculating the midpoint :)

:thumbs-up:

I'd round it to probably just 2 significant digits.

I don't care if it's $91,132 or $90,725 or $91,412 - all of those are effectively the same as $91k (unless I'm the vendor trying to work out who's leaking my pricing).

What I'm looking for as a potential new customer is to see if it's going toi cost me ~200k or ~90k or ~10k or ~3k.

Thanks for this suggestion! We have implemented this change

to the nearest thousand or hundred.

731 seats @ $77492.32 could be ~700-750 seats at ~$75k-$80k and that's still a useful guide for me.

A lot of estimations are done with "t-shirt sizes", and just knowing a rough range with a rough margin of error makes things so much easier. I'll let my procurement team fight for the $3k or 31 user difference, and do the back and forth with quotes, but I can run w/ those broad numbers right now

Submitting fake overpriced quotes for my competitor’s products

Ah, clever. Committing document fraud?

> Buyers contribute prices via quotes, pricing proposals, and other documentation to ensure quality.

> Committing document fraud

Stop using words that makes it sounds like a crime. It’s a survey. Nobody is under any legal requirement to provide correct info.

>It’s a survey. Nobody is under any legal requirement to provide correct info.

A review is arguably just a "survey" as well, but if you provide incorrect info (ie. lie) you can be sued for defamation.

Corporations can be defamed?

Why can't they?

It's a fictive person and not a real one?

In the US, corps can have religious beliefs… so maybe a real entity?

Corporations being "fictive person" (whatever that means) isn't a relevant factor. What does matter is that they are legal persons[1], and therefore can sue people under tort law. It's not hard to find defamation cases where corporations are the plaintiffs[2]. In fact corporations suing people for defamation is such a big issue that there's even legislation to prevent it from being abused[3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood#In_the_Un...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsidian_Finance_Group,_LLC_v....

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_publ...

Yes, 'legal person', as opposed to real or physical person, i.e. a fictive person.

In the US, can other fictive persons sue for defamation too? If I walk around in a US city with a sign claiming that Barney the dinosaur stole diapers from orphans and use hard drugs, is that legally defamation? Or is it restricted to fictions used to name and organise economic activity, is it money and bookkeeping that creates this particular personhood?

> Yes, 'legal person', as opposed to real or physical person, i.e. a fictive person.

>In the US, can other fictive persons sue for defamation too?

The case law is pretty clear that yes, corporations can sue for defamation. As I mentioned before, you can find plenty of appellate-level cases where corporations have sued others for defamation. The fact that nobody has seriously tried to have such cases quashed on account of "corporations are fictive persons" or whatever suggests that it's not a serious legal argument worth considering. Arguing over this makes as much sense as arguing whether driving a car counts as "traveling" and whether that's protected by the constitution or not[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_citizen_movement#Tra...

You forgot to answer my question.

If you think it's fine and dandy that fictions are treated as if they're real in courts, that's just like your opinion, man.

Where I live, fictions aren't treated that way. The closest thing we have is immaterial rights, copyright and the like, 'protecting the fruits of spiritual labour'.

>If you think it's fine and dandy that fictions are treated as if they're real in courts, that's just like your opinion, man.

1. it's not just "like [my] opinion, man", it's how the legal system works in the US and most common law jurisdictions. You thinking otherwise makes as much sense as the people who think they don't need driver's licenses because they're not "driving", they're "traveling".

2. It sounds like you reject the concept of corporate personhood entirely. That's fine and all, but it's weird to bring that up when talking about tangential topics (eg. whether you can be sued for providing false information). It's even more weird to bring it up in a manner that suggests you're describing how the legal system works, rather than your opinion on how it ought to act.

>Where I live, fictions aren't treated that way

And what jurisdiction is that?

If submitting a (false) quote requires submitting falsified invoices, contracts etc, I'm not so sure it's not illegal?

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Deception for financial gain is textbook fraud [1]. Probably even Securities Fraud.

Given you can be sued for leaving a negative review [2] it seems entirely accurate you could get sued for leaving a false pricing info.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraud

[2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/10/can-you-get-sued-over-a-nega...

You can get sued for anything in the US, that doesn't make something a crime.

the CNBC link you provided even says that the guy who got sued for the review later won the case

further more to win the case the other company will have to prove that 1) the document were fake, and that we faked them, and 2) that it doesn't match their real pricing, which means sharing that pricing info with the court and the other party. sure boss, sue me, and tell everyone what your actual pricing structure is, on the record, and at risk of contempt of court. that could be far more damaging than than any actual blowback from people making up numbers on the internet.

hell, post how expensive my product is, so that when I discount it heavily to future customers they think they're getting a sweetheart deal. "oh that quote was for a customer who wanted several bespoke features added, so it was expensive for them. but it helped mature the platform :)"

Not really. It's a sarcastic comment to highlight a potential loophole.

Really great job. Whether it’s legal for customers to share this info or not is really a gray area.

If the data is only shared in an aggregate fashion, I doubt they can do much without a subpoena. And then what? Sue the website? Sorry, no. Section 230.

John Doe suits against anonymous customers?

Nothing requires PriceLevel to retain the PII of users… they can capture the data, validate, and flush the PII. “Sorry, we have no information about the contributor of this data.”

My sense is this will be the primary innovation of this service— how to get this info and keep it useful to end users without very much ability to vet it. Worth the effort.

> John Doe suits against anonymous customers?

How many TalkDesk customers do you suppose there are paying $91,132 for 62 users?

I'd guess TalkDesk know exactly who that is.

(I doubt that makes it any easier to prevail if they try to sue them, but I wouldn't want to be the customer negotiating next years contract wit them.

"Hi, it's TalkDesk account management here. Just letting you know your contract expires at the end of next month. Here's a new contract for the following 12 months, with the special for you pricing of $425,762 for your 62 seats. Hope to hear from you soon, and have a nice day!"

The advice I had related to pricing which captures the gist. If the website does not show prices and asks you to call then expect to pay at least a five figured sum.

monthly or annually?

Annually to start with because most prices are quoted annually for mid to enterprise size deals.

yes

Yep, that's because it wouldn't be economical for the company to have a sales team and require a demo call if the contract is anything less.

Looks like a nice service, it also sounds like something the SaaS companies who's pricing information you are showing would not like.

I'm curious how you look at that? Are there any legal risks for end users to share this type of information via your site? I'm thinking if the SaaS providers have some legal statements about not sharing prices (similar to how certain database providers don't allow sharing of database benchmarks).

Buyer anonymity is mission critical for us and we've taken some steps to do that like generalizing company size and industry. There's been some great feedback in this thread (thanks everybody!) about additional fuzzing we can do to protect our buyers that we'll implement.

While there may be some SaaS companies who don't like this level of transparency, we hope this actually leads to a faster sales cycle because buyers have pre-qualified themselves.

> we hope this actually leads to a faster sales cycle because buyers have pre-qualified themselves.

But by obfuscating their pricing they are able to create a marketing "lead" when you contact them that will one day evolve into a client and therefor its better for them to "pre-qualify" you.

I personally hate this model as it drives me absolutely insane to spend a month of going back and forth with a vendor, going over what i'd like to do and why, investing time in understanding their stack and product, only to find out its 2x my budget or something like they wont even consider me since its less than 10k. If you hide your pricing, make me go through an extensive process, and I let you know im trying to implement a PoC or a small entry level and you come at me with $1k/month I'm likely going to walk away and be frustrated enough to not want to do business with you ever. You've created more of a negative experience that i will tell others about than a "lead". Yet this goes against every companies thinking (even my won) so it must work on someone.

> If you hide your pricing, make me go through an extensive process, and I let you know im trying to implement a PoC or a small entry level and you come at me with $1k/month I'm likely ...

... to see if I can replicate the important parts of your SaaS for my needs, then open source it or start a competitor with a sane and transparent pricing structure to capture the rest of the market like me.

Maybe you've done this already, but from here it looks like you're publishing 5 or 6 significant digits of someone's pricing. I know if you did that with my companies product, we'd be able to identify a customer with very very high accuracy from that.

Unless "$91,132" is an indicative but somewhat randomised number, I'd strongly suggest listing that as "$91k" to reduce the information leakage about which customer gave you that number. (Same with the number of seats, although it looks like there's less entropy in this numbers at a quick glance.)

Price per what unit? For example, checked out Hubspot, the price could be monthly but it's not clear to me.

I'd assume monthly but I'd rather not have to assume.

And I'd've assumed $/yr. Otherwise … $1M/y for Slack? I figure that's probably too high … or someone is getting fleeced.

But yeah, the number of times I've seen management spreadsheets doing math on "$" where "$" is a weakly-typed mix of $/mo & $/yr, and then the "result" used to "justify" decisions…

We've normalized the prices to per year based on the feedback - thanks everybody

Thought this was a great idea until I saw you had to create an account to see details. Seems pretty antithetical to the entire premise.

Would you give valuable information away for free? Of course not.

I think that the entire net economy has to make new social contracts about price discovery.. somewhere between Debian and Oracle.. for example.. and I support open data generally. But how is it antithetical to make a service for site customers with a login? given high-powered robots on the net and very unexpected guests as a fact-of-life on the network.. this seems more like locking your door at night in a mid-sized town, not some deep betrayal of cause or rank hypocrisy .. no?

I think basically all non-PII data should be Free as in Freedom, but this is an interesting business problem. You can view it for free, if you submit 5 pricing datapoints of your own.

If it was all free, I suppose they'd have to reduce whatever friction they have in authenticating data input (I'm assuming they ask to see invoices or contracts for now), and run the risk of competitors pricing eachother up or just bad data being entered.

Gonna make a new site that just embeds a Google Sheet and lists all the pricing details - PriceLevelLevel.com

A json file in a Github is all you need

I pay for hubspot quarterly and still have no idea how their contract works or how much I'm supposed to be paying without letting our contract audit DNN have a whack at it. Completely opaque order forms and value. I'm convinced we should just be using a google sheet like wework did until they went public.

Totally. Spreadsheets are king.

The problem with this approach is that often for any sort of "Enterprise" deal the contract varies wildly, not just in agreed pricing terms but in length and terms and conditions. For example I've inked contracts where there were additional terms covering availability and refunds, severability, liability, and so on. This isn't unusual, but it usually does impact the price to some extent.

Additionally for large contracts there is often feature work or support in the form of bespoke software deliverables.

It's one thing if you, the SaaS, know what your price is, and everyone is more or less paying the same, in which case this tool works. But otherwise without all the additional contract nits it's not going to paint a clear picture.

aye. i've had one-off data center colo contracts with ramps up for space and power use. sales guy and I were basically making up numbers on the spot. currently dealing with similar approaches in the cloud space, though the (major) provider isn't as flexible with their ramp.

How do you know people are entering pricing info honestly? How do I trust anonymous respondents?

Not OP, but I suspect they wait until they have lots of quotes from different sources and then pick the median.

You can make sure people who sign up use their company email. If they are found to add wrong information you can block their account.

You can also give companies an opportunity to reply to a post.

interesting that this and Blind dont seem to use zero knowledge proofs when the need for provable knowledge w/ privacy would seem super useful

Related to that, I know that the SINE foundation[0] has been investigating using zero knowledge proofs for benchmarking.

I also looks like they recently released a tool concretely to allow for privacy preserving benchmarking[1]. (I haven't looked into the the contents of the repo itself to check whether they are actually using zero knowledge proofs).

[0]: https://sine.foundation

[1]: https://github.com/sine-fdn/sine-benchmark

> If they are found to add wrong information you can block their account.

How would you prove that a submission is not truthful? You can check if it's an outlier but that's definitely not foolproof.

It looks like you can trade insights for an unlimited account, so I'm assuming they actually vet your claims, e.g. ask for identifying information on who you are and what your company is, and ask to see evidence e.g. invoices, contracts. I mean, that's how I'd do it if I was wanting to build a platform with trustworthy, essentially canonical pricing lists, and charging a couple hundred bucks a year for people to see that info.

Probably against document disclosure rules of any competent medium to large company.

Reminds me of machowski's article on order books.

By making these things public, I think it'll decrease the variance in costs in the space. If it was public knowledge how similar SaaS are priced, people would always go for the cheaper option (this assumes identical features, which is not the case).

I guess in the end, pricing is determined by costs (materials, labor, rents) for a floor and then profits (which might as well be a random number).

https://www.machow.ski/posts/2021-07-18-introduction-to-limi...

no - the brand has value for discovery and building new customer relationships, then details of sector, sales, contractual requirements, sector "norms" .. lots of details ..

This is really nice and I like it a lot, disregarding of the "transparency" thing, I completely loathe when I have to "call to get a quote" for a SaaS. If you can quote a launch to orbit online [1], you can abso-fucking-lutely give me a concrete price for your relatively simple SPA when I'm browsing through it.

A suggestion, the price is unclear, is it per month? per year? one time? per the events described? Make that clear.

Congrats for shipping!

1: https://www.spacex.com/rideshare/

Thanks! And definitely hear you on the suggestion, it's something we've heard from other users so we'll implement that

Update: we've normalized the prices to per year based on the feedback - thank you for the suggestion

Add region or locations immediately. Single biggest factor outside of customer size or how much product they’re buying.

Also contract length. Pretty common to get deep discounts with multi year agreements.

Useful info. Might want to make the ordered quantity and contract length ranges though, re: fuzzing anything that might identify the client

Mm, yea - that's a buyer attribute we can add to clarify.

And definitely! We do have contract length, though that's locked away as a Pro feature

Update: we've added geography to buyer attributes and clarified the contract length

Great idea, great site. I signed up. But post-sign up on the modal explaining how it works I was unable to scroll below “Upgrade”, in order to reach the continue button.

iPhone SE2.

Keen to use this. Having just been through the dance to obtain Drata, I’d love to just know the price ahead of time.

I know there was a YC company many years ago that “negotiated saas pricing as a service”.

The pain is not just knowing the price, it’s also: - what features and versions of features are included in why I’m paying for??

- what is the value of the extra bs that’s being packaged in, and can I negotiate it away? Or how can I make use of it?

I feels there’s a lot of value in a community of recent buyers of a product being able to communicate openly. Any company that takes actions against their own customers for trying to make the most of their product should be replaced.

Oof, thank you for telling us about the modal and the iphone model - we're on it.

This is one of the most amazing products I have seen in long time in HN. This is simple but super valuable!

One thing, I would recommend is to add some indicators that can help us trust the information or the data you are providing. It would go a long way then.

Can I think of it as Glassdoor for SaaS?

That's exactly what I thought of. Hopefully that model can shield from any lawsuit attempts.

Lists price, but doesn't state the term (monthly, yearly, etc.)

Great idea, congrats on the launch - valuable to learn where pricing deals end.

SaaS sales can be guilty of drive-by sales, where the implementation fails to reach promises.

It puts a black eye too often on good products.

At $500 per year for an account and posting here you're just asking for other people to do the same and undercut you

This looks like a handy service for anyone evaluating enterprise software. Is there any normalization done on the pricing to account for things like contract duration, number of seats, feature tiers, etc? Or is it just the raw pricing data?

We've gotten good feedback around the need to normalize total price shown by contract duration. As for other normalization, we breakout pricing into per seat cost, etc in the detailed pricing insights.

Looks like you're leaking marketing data about your visitors to clearbit.com.

Why isn't stuff like microsoft office included in here?

Very nice indeed.

A suggestion - I cannot tell if the pricing is per contract/per month/per year etc. Would be great to be able to collect all this info and then slice and dice it.

Thanks! We'll implement the pricing normalization re timeframe, that's been a popular suggestion that makes a lot of sense

Update: we have normalized the pricing to per year based on the feedback, thank you

I am not sure where the information was gained, but I believe this is only a fraction of the overall costs for an organisation. (probably limited number of account(s)).

How do you verify accuracy of contributions? What stops somebody from submitting fake (overpriced) numbers for companies they don’t like (competitors)?

this is what I want to know and somebody in the comments already said they are going to do exactly that.

One data point: I'd happily pay 20x your current pro price point if you are able to expand the suppliers covered and the n for each.

Out of curiosity, what would be your n for each supplier?

Good idea. It needs to be clearly global though.

So simple but good.

Now we need a similar thing that publishes database benchmarks in spite of DeWitt. Use a few standardized datasets and boom.

What is the incentive to contribute and how do you check the legitimacy of the numbers provided?

I imagine it plays into the pricing.

Contributing data is one method to gain full access to our pricing data set. Alternatively, users can also pay for access.

Regarding quality, we're manually reviewing every data point for credibility before making it available.

Bloody life saver! So hard to find this, and all I want is a basic understanding. Thank you!

How do you keep something like this up to date? Not like you could scrape it from somewhere…

This is a great idea. Nice work!

Thank you!

Am I missing something is or Salesforce (the og SaaS) missing from your list?

Coming today!

Be very very careful with products in the same space. NetSuite, for example, has disclosure clauses in its contracts. Oracle is a law firm that happens to make software.

This is COOL! Finally some transparency honestly it was much needed

lol this is why everything is in an NDA upfront.

For us, every customer has pretty unique, so even two feature sets that look the same might have wildly different support agreements.