[ricardo]

This is the typical model for enterprise software that is sold through a sales team. The price of the product is determined by how much the customer is willing to pay and can vary widely from one sale to the next. Sales made this way usually yield a higher price at the expense of speed/volume. You can only sell as fast as your sales team works.

[seiji]

Just because it's typical doesn't mean it's efficient or useful.

There's a new generation of people with purchase authority rising up. I'd rather go with a slightly more expensive company with open pricing rather than a closed company where I constantly have to negotiate small discounts off of a "retail price" nobody ever actually pays (except the government, of course).

[nzmsv]

This is what I meant. These developer tools aren't really aimed at developers (most of whom would probably pick a tool with a nice tutorial over the one with a quote request form).

So it doesn't really matter if most hackers would hate this sales tactic. What matters in this case is it works on salespeople :)