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Comment by harryf | Hacker News Reader

I work at https://www.pdf-tools.com and we hear this again and again.

Despite the proliferation of cloud services, most large enterprises DO NOT want their sensitive documents entering the cloud. And in some cases, e.g. patient medical records, there are strict regulations about how those documents can be stored, which means on-premise is a requirement.

Good news for us, as that's what we specialise in, but also perplexing how trends in the software industry can completely ignore what customers actually want.

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Looks interesting.

However, the pricing page with no actual numbers and the ambiguous ‘Contact Us’ is a huge turn off.

I cannot stand the dance with business people who want to have a bunch of calls and meetings to know how big a company they’re dealing with is before they decide on a good rate to gouge them.

Pricing pages should be straight forward. Have tiers if you want to cover your rear but only at the limit of usage have the ‘Contact Us’ option.

I’m shopping around for a PDF solution and would’ve recommended this to my manager but I’m not willing to do more meetings to get quotes.

> the ambiguous ‘Contact Us’ is a huge turn off

Same. About three years ago we introduced a company wide policy to not buy anything where the price is not known. So, so much time (money) being wasted on figuring out the actual costs, the offering would have to be really inexpensive to make up for this. And if that were the case, the price would be right there.

Yup.

They usually do high usage volume pricing at high rates that are proportional to the size of the company and make you sign a yearly agreement so they can get a huge payment upfront.

How about building some trust? What if the service sucks? It will be hard to get your money back and you paid a year in advance.

They make you work to get a quote and the quote usually doesn’t work for your needs.

I too will not look at services with this pricing structure anymore unless word of mouth is favorable.

very good heuristic. I'll be borrowing. Any others you'd care to share ?

> the pricing page with no actual numbers and the ambiguous ‘Contact Us’ is a huge turn off.

It’s also one of the top-10 web usability mistakes as defined by the Nielsen Norman group.

As in, it drives away far more potential clients than it can possibly convert. It’s a massive anti-pattern.

Large enterprises can afford to take things in house and might even save money that way, not to mention the security gains. Medical offices have no choice. However small companies often don't have anyone in IT (other than the CEO who does everything and only rarely knows what he is doing other than the niche the company is in). These should be the prime market for tools like this - just pay us a little bit and we will worry about he details for you - everything is backed up. However if you can get one enterprise account that is a lot more money than thousands of little accounts and so everyone focuses on them anyway.

> Good news for us, as that's what we specialise in, but also perplexing how trends in the software industry can completely ignore what customers actually want.

I initially read this backwards and thought you were lamenting that people insist on on-prem stuff when cloud is clearly The Right Thing.

I certainly don't think the entire software industry is ignoring what customers actually want. Case in point, you. But also lots of other developers who thrive in covering the myriad use cases the myopic behemoths can't see. They just have very loud PR and marketing and pretend those cases don't exist, so you hear about them a lot.

You seem to think that users want everything in the cloud and that’s what’s causing the proliferation of cloud services. You are wrong. Users want _convenience_. They couldn’t care less about the cloud or technical details. If your website can do what they want to do without uploading their documents to your server then and if it’s faster and cheaper then that’s what they’ll prefer.

No PHP nor JavaScript SDK? You guys don't like money?

It's a fair point. Most of our customers work with CPP, C# and Java in enterprise / back office contexts, which is why no PHP or Javascript right now - we've been tied up with other priorities. That said we just added Python to our main SDK and PHP is coming.

Plus our enterprise automation product can basically talk to anything via REST API ( https://www.pdf-tools.com/docs/conversion-service/api/conver... ).

But yeah - now you got me fired up to annoy some colleagues ;)

I would think that JS/TS support would be relatively high up... my own bias speaking, but a lot of development and effort to easing cloud apps is JS/TS centric.

PHP and Javascript? So you never worked on "enterprise"?

I work in a FAANG on stuff that is definitely "enterprise software", a major part of what we develop is written in TypeScript.

I admit PHP will not be as good of a candidate but for smaller companies it is still extremely attractive, and it's probably easier to develop since you can write PHP extension in C.

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