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Comment by reinhardt | Hacker News Reader

Also known as "product".

A "product" with no prices listed, just the shady practice of forcing you to contact them and having them work out a "quote" for you.

I really hate it when companies feel they cannot be transparent about pricing, it is such an obvious strategy to work out how much they can squeeze out of each potential customer. How are you meant to trust a company like that?

I had contacted them for a quote a little over a month ago. Had to get on the phone with the sales guy to get any information. My favourite part is when you fill out the online form for a quote, the autoresponder says "Based on the answers you provided, we will decide whether you qualify and come back to you as soon as possible."

I don't remember the prices offhand but it was $57K US for a 3 node license at platinum support level and around $14k per node after that. He did provide that over the phone (but as I check my email, not in written form) on our first call.

Oh, much worse than I thought. How can they justify this price tag? Anyway, Nginx + LuaJIT (custom-build, Tengine, or OpenResty) beats both plain Nginx caching and Varnish. I was considering using Varnish in front of Nginx with PageSpeed, but given the direction they are taking, I'm sticking with Nginx although it's taking a similar dangerous direction recently.

There was an article here on HN just a few weeks ago how the "Contact Us" pricing model actually often works better for generating sales than having listed prices.

I can't find it now, so my comment doesn't particularly add much value, but hopefully someone else can provide the link.

It is my experience that this is true. However, it is probably smart to list some minimal prices so people that are in different ballparks can adjust.

It's true for some. I would never ever buy or recommend a product with no listed price. It's a psychological thing - you always think they charge you more than others. For example, with Akamai, at two very large of their customers, one was getting charged $300/hour and the other - $600/hour.

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