Ask HN: How high ( | Hacker News Readers) should you go when showing pricing on your website? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How high ($'s) should you go when showing pricing on your website?

7 pointsjusben13693 comments

We're all familiar with sites that have 3 or 4 plans for different categories of usage. Then there's the "Need Enterprise pricing? Contact us" or something similar. When, why and how to you make the determination to have pricing that you don't show? Why not show it all or show none vs show some and then tell your biggest prospective customers to contact you? How do "enterprise" buyers feel when they see that? Catered to or potentially manipulated?

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My argument against showing no pricing is that general consumers are similar enough that you can bucket them. They want to see pricing. And they're smaller dollar values, so you can't afford to take the time to customize a quote for them.

Enterprise buyers are used to the effort to get a quote. And they want to feel special. Combine that with how different they are (is enterprise 100 users, or 10,000?), and you can see why they aren't sufficiently similar to treat in one plan. The high dollar value also means you can afford to have a high touch sales process.

Normal customers often shop on price. Enterprise customers often don't. You're selling to the normals, and sending a signal to enterprise folks that you can handle a customer of their size.

Once you start getting to large scale purchases you'll tend to need to do a lot more hand-holding to close the sale in any case.

It's not about pulling out a credit card and just paying for the service, but about multiple people in the customers company having to approve of the purchase (including the team manager, their manager, the CIO, the purchasing department, legal, etc.)

One of the key parts of an enterprise salespersons job is to help the individual at the company who wants to purchase the product to navigate their own internal purchasing process.

Enterprise sales can often involve more work in-term of onboarding and ensuring your capacity scales to handle them correctly. Enterprise customer will also often want to negotiate pricing and have custom legal terms drawn up (NDAs, etc.).

Because of all these factors it doesn't make sense to have an upfront price because the sales price will vary from customer to customer.

You might find this article (currently on the front-page) to be useful:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5435862

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