* Tiers (aka new car model): something is always strategically left out of the otherwise "ideal" tier to force you up a level, even though you won't use most of the other options. Sometimes the "nearly there" tier is artificially expensive to drive you to the higher tier - the same trick as a medium coffee being only fractionally cheaper than the large. Sometimes there's a ratchet where you can upgrade but a downgrade is a huge hassle and/or penalised.
* A la carte (aka the car/dishwasher spares model): every option feels expensive and you feel like you're being nickel-and-dimed and you know the marginal cost of providing that option was small
* Top-up (aka the phone minutes model): top ups are obscenely expensive and are either a punishment for being "cheap" (i.e. prudent) or act as a threat to push you up a tier in the first place
Add a few special offers, points, cost sinks and lock-ins (especially where hardware is involved), rewards and all that crap here and there to muddy it up to prevent a clear comparison being made. I basically assume all subscriptions are doing some kind of mind-games or scam with every little aspect of the pricing.
Not that a fair price can't be any of the above options. The vendor has to cover the overheads somewhere!
Before the LLM boom, I wouldn't have thought twice about having fine-grained options, but since then, every SaaS company on the face of the planet has forcibly bundled ChatGPT and its ilk and jacked up prices — LLM crap I don't use and don't plan to use in its current state.
Similarly, many might wanna go initially with a simple option but later, based on their usage, whittle it down to the few that are relevant, save money in the process, and commit to the company.
Want a single product? It's only available for annual subscriptions for hundreds of dollars, with huge cancellation fees (the rest of the year). But it comes with a dozen or so products you'll never download lol
Yes. Welcome to the world of committed contracts, call-us pricing, and “partnerships. At many-zeroes scale every cent is negotiated to the point that you’ll get different pricing based on the hour of the day that you make the API call.