[mseebach]

You may want to get them "confused" (or, to use a more positive phrase, excited), but crucially, you don't want them to get sticker shock. Most software is essentially free on the margin. You don't want to leave $20k on the table by scaring them with a $40k price tag, but you also don't want to charge someone who'd be happy to pay you $50k tens of thousands less, just because you felt called to put a number on your website.

[taneq]

That kind of pricing is bad in the long run, though, because that customer who paid $50k is eventually going to learn that their competitor only paid you $20k and then they're going to be pissed at you about it forever and ever.

[mseebach]

In practice, the $50k customer will typically be getting something tangible that the $20k customer isn't. Perhaps they have a custom feature developed, perhaps they have special on-call/on-site support, perhaps they pay a much discounted unit-price, say $10/user (but for 5000 light users) where the other customer is paying $200/user for 100 heavy users.

If you're selling the exact same product ("exact" in the business-sense that includes stuff like support or long-term price commitments, not in the geek-sense where CentOS is the exact same as RedHat) for two vastly different price points, you should probably make sure those customers don't meet.

[stuartaxelowen]

Um, will they? I've never heard of this happening.

[taneq]

Will they learn about it? Or will they be pissed about it? For the former point, people move jobs, people talk, word gets around. For the latter, that's just human nature.