Comment by 0xbadcafebee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0xbadcafebee | Hacker News Reader

Hey SaaS. Here's what I want from you (re: sign-ups):

1. Show me your price, with multiple pricing tiers. The more tiers you have, the more likely I am going to pick one of them, because I will think "well this lower tier is quite the deal compared to the higher tiers!". If I am an Enterprise customer, I will disregard you as an option if I can't see a price. Don't even show me the tier at all if you aren't going to show me your price. I get immediately incensed when I see that "Contact us for pricing!" bullshit, because I know how much bullshit I am in for if I just want to get a quote, so I look for somebody else. I want to use your product right now. But I'm not going to use it if I think it will be painful to work with your company, or that you might have exorbitant pricing, or you're just looking for whales. Don't make me discount you.

2. Let me use your product, immediately. Let me run it from my laptop immediately. Let me spin up a PoC. Show me your complete reference docs immediately. Show me a toy implementation w/source. I want to know if this will [eventually] give me what I want, within 15 minutes. Do that and you will already have gone above and beyond 95% of SaaS (in my mind).

3. Let me have gradient pricing. Let me sign up right away and start using your product for $0, for 5 users. Send me an e-mail when I have 7 users, informing me that I have 30 days to either reduce the number of users to 5, or it will automatically upgrade my account and charge me more (or make me confirm, or whatever). Same for the next tier, etc. (or 'pre-purchase' discounts vs 'on-demand' overage cost, etc) This gives me flexibility: I know our workflows won't just stop working when we hit a limit, and I can acquiesce to the new price or clean up old users.

4. Let me start using your product without a card on file. Sometimes it takes a while to find the right corporate person with the right corp card (if they even let me use a corp card, rather than invoicing). If you really need a card, give me 15-30 days, and then pause my account if you have to. The point is to let me get "hooked" on your product without needing to figure out which card to use first. (It goes without saying that when the card expires or a charge doesn't go through, give me 30 days to resolve it, because usually the corp card has hit its limit)

So it's interesting. Everything you ask for here is something I, personally, as an independent wanna-get-my-hands-dirty nerd, would ask for too. I totally get where you're coming from.

But the thing is - the reason large companies often don't give folks like you and me these things is becuase there are proven reasons to do the contrary that actually end up making them more money. It sucks, but it's reality.

1. "Call us" pricing works because for big enterprise deals (4-7+ figures), there's often some serious negotiation involved and if you just show a sticker price up front, you risk a) scaring the buyer because the price is too high, b) losing the buyer because your competitor will just negotiate a better price than your listed price or b) leave yourself no room to negotiate if you really put your best price on the website.

2. Offering immediate free trials where you can jump in right away is the ideal world for nerds -- again, I love it personally. But software is often complex, and a guided demo/implementation is often the best path to make sure your buyers are actually successful. Otherwise you risk a lot of folks who sign up, jump in, have no idea what they're doing, and then abandon the trial immediately and go to a competitor who held their hand.

3. "Let me sign up right away and start using your product for $0..." If only offering Freemium were so simple. You will immediately have to deal with porn (it's always porn - and often kiddie porn. These people will figure out incredibly creative ways to use your SaaS product to host illegal content one way or another), spam, fraud, customer service issues, etc. There are many valid reasons to offer Freemium. There are many valid reasons not to do so. It's just not so simple.

4. Again, think about the flip side here. Lower friction to sign-ups without a card, but SO much hassle when it comes time to pay -- now you have to nag, bug, etc. to get payment, and then you have to delete accounts that are dormant. And you have much lower buying intent signals, etc. etc. etc.

I wish the world of software catered to folks like us, but I fully and completely understand why it doesn't.

Indeed many of these "complaints" are explicitly designed to filter out high-maintenance, needy, and stingy customers, leaving you with the people who are more than happy to say "shut up and take my money."

> 1. "Call us" pricing works because for big enterprise deals (4-7+ figures), there's often some serious negotiation involved and if you just show a sticker price up front, you risk a) scaring the buyer because the price is too high, b) losing the buyer because your competitor will just negotiate a better price than your listed price or b) leave yourself no room to negotiate if you really put your best price on the website.

I'd disagree and say this can go either way. As an enterprise buyer I know both MY budget and that all numbers are negotiable - to some extent. If you show me that this product costs $100k and my budget is $80k, I'll still talk to you. But if you list $100k and all I've got is $25k for the budget, yes, I'm going elsewhere.

Now you might argue "We can make something work" I'm concerned. You'll do 80% off deal? Clearly you don't think your product is worth what you list so... now I don't think so either. And the "But We've got a tier for that" then list it.

My time is way valuable to me. I do not want to go through 3 screening calls, a shit ton of hoops, and a 2 week wait... just to find out that your product is way too expensive for my budget. Especially when getting into those sales calls where the reps wanna play coy and say "Well whats your budget" or "Well it really depends, we want to get into a POC bla bla bla to understand your useless before providing a pricing". Ain't no one got time for that shit. Give me the MSRP up front (with the understanding that a deal may be reachable if it's a little much) or I'm walking.

Keep in mind that when I'm pricing your product I'm probably pricing 3 to 5 others. There is literally not enough hours left in my life to give each and every vendor a 5 hours of time in order to get a price.

Fortunately the world is shifting. You know who's pricing is available on their website? Salesforce. Okta. OneLogin. Ping. Slack. Github. Gitlab. AWS. Google. Microsoft (for some). Elastic. Tailscale. Adobe. Databricks. Datadog. Cloudflare. Zoom. ... The list goes on. In other words there are a lot of companies out there with their prices available on their website right this second. Sure, almost everyone of them has a "Enterprise call us for pricing" option and that's fine, as long as you've got something for me to start with.

If you're a software vendor and don't have some prices to start with, you're at a major disadvantage. Because your competitors often do. And price is not the only thing buyers are looking for. If it was, Okta would have no business. You can look at their prices and OneLogin and Ping's (and Azure AD and Google). The entire IAM/SSO space has their prices right out front and Okta is... the most expensive. Yet somehow they all still are selling.

To add to this: I have been in the position to push for a 6-7 figure investment in a product, and have passed on companies, because they made it so insanely frustrating just to give them my money, let alone get a quote. Meeting after meeting, powerpoint after powerpoint. Some had literally zero way to pay, even for a lower tier, so there was no way I could try out the product at all. We skipped them all. You know what we did go with? A hodge-podge of AWS services, with on-demand pricing, that definitely was more expensive than the SaaS and took us more time and manpower to get working. It wasn't a niche solution, either.

Often we don't need the whole company to be locked into whatever the Enterprise feature is. Maybe we only need a single feature, and that has a given dollar value for us, and for the provider.

SSO for example costs the provider almost nothing in terms of compute/network, and little in terms of development and support; so why not let people pay a-la-carte for SSO? Cheap enough to be worth it, not so expensive as to be a turn-off. You could have one bulk price for SSO, or even charge per authenticated user! The point is to make it flexible, but still extract some money for that feature that hardly costs you anything to support.

Another example: let them have complex IAM (groups, roles, etc) for one price, and SSO costs extra. OR they can call to negotiate. This way they can pay now a-la-carte, or they can try to get a better price, or they can just settle for not using the feature. But it gets them on your platform, giving you money, in some form or another. Add up all the a-la-carte features and you get a bloated quote, but you can offer discounts for package deals.

You're dead on with all of this. To add to your point, the worst and most regrettable software product my company uses would have been immediately exposed as non-viable had I been allowed to get my hands dirty and run a couple of test cases. As it was, the sales-person "yada-yada'd" my technical questions (more fool me, yes, but I didn't know enough about their internals - the primary cause of our discontent stems from a truly stupid database-design decision) and so I lacked the context to make an informed decision. (I'm more experienced and more suspicious now; I don't think I'd make the same mistake again.) You can add borderline-fraudulent sales practice and avoiding discovery of truly bad products to the list.

What you say is true, but it’s because their pricing is deliberately complex and they’re performing yield maximization. I get that. However, it feels more like a new car negotiation that wastes everyone’s time. If you’re willing to accept X price at Y volume, just say that. If you offer discounts at certain tiers, provide those tiers.

Mutual Fund companies do it, and successfully, even if you’re only signing a letter of intent and aren’t buying at the higher tier today.

The charade involving salespeople, and let-me-talk-to-my-manager isn’t as productive as it seems. I’ve walked from several vendors (or discounted them in an RFP) due to that behavior.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com