[dheera]

> "contact sales" products

We need a Wiki-ish Chrome plugin that pastes in actual prices on all websites that have "contact sales" pricing. If you are the first to contact sales, you can fill it in for future customers to see without needing to contact sales.

This would also help expose price discrimination, in which companies give favorable pricing to people of a certain race or nationality or industry or location.

I hate it when I contact sales and they ask "may we know more about your application?" and my next thought is always "how about you tell me your price first, and then I'll be happy to share". "may we know your name" -> "why, so you can decide your offer price based on if I'm white or asian or something?". "may we know your location" -> "why, so you can decide your price based on the average income in my area?"

[memetomancer]

This sounds just like someone calling up McClaren or Ferrari and demanding an MSRP on one of their Formula-1 cars... and screaming RACISM if they don't have an immediate answer.

Systems like this are not just sitting on a shelf with a price tag... there are tons of other considerations going on here: integration, deployment and support contracts... required infrastructure like power, network switches - even cabling can go into the tens of thousands of dollars.

No chrome plugin is going to fix this "contact sales" problem, and assuming some nefarious racist intent only goes to show that the inquiry is a waste of time for the person on the other end of the line.

[dheera]

> and screaming RACISM if they don't have an immediate answer

Oh I can tell you plenty of stories of suppliers giving you lower prices depending on what human language you speak with them. It happens, and people should know that it happens.

> even cabling can go into the tens of thousands of dollars

For those types of products, great, I'd like to know that cabling will be ~$10K-$50K, fixed costs will be $10K, and support contracts will be ~$1-5K/month. I just want an order of magnitude. Is this $100, $1000, or $100,000 that I'm looking at? I want an order of magnitude before a phone call. If such a plugin existed, at least I could see the distributions in pricing among past customers.

[sulam]

Yes, in your first example this is known as “value-based pricing.”

However, when it comes to quantum computing, they may be trying to determine if your application is even relevant to their solution.