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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.

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."

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.

> 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.