[detaro]

oof, that's ugly to hide like that.

[tomrod]

Indeed.

Hey enterprise sales folks. If you want me to use your enterprise services, post your prices.

We're all adults here. If I can't afford your offering and you still want my business, we can work out a discount.

If you're going to make me hop through hoops to find or determine pricing, you go directly to the bottom of my comparison list, and possibly leave it altogether. If you're truly the only option in market you _might_ make it if I can't afford to build your service.

Stop foggy pricing. We've known since at least 2013 this is a bad economic practice.

[0] Miravete, E.J., 2013. Competition and the use of foggy pricing. American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 5(1), pp.194-216.

[tootie]

That's usually not really practical. Even businesses that have transparent pricing by usage still have enterprise sales teams and their customers always want to negotiate. Usage patterns are all unique. Sometimes you can offer non-monetary value like case studies, beta testing, or some sort of in-kind service. You can trade on commitment times versus price per transaction or price per user or whatever. There's no easy way around it.

[tomrod]

A top comment from reddit's sysadmin forum that is apropos:

> If SpaceX can list pricing for launching a payload into space on their website, you can do the same for your [...] software.

If I want to use your software as-is without access to your developers to prioritize features, there isn't a need for "enterprise" approaches.

[tootie]

Like I said, even places that list prices want you to negotiate. The list prices above a certain threshold are typically higher than most enterprises are actually paying because the get discounts in exchange for commitments or other considerations. True of all the public cloud providers.

[ushakov]

that's not how enterprise sales work

if you want them to have your business, then you have to post your budget

it's a great way to filter out orgs that have no money to begin with

and big businesses might be paranoid about their competitors knowing their costs

[tomrod]

> if you want their business, then you have to post your budget

Getting someone's business means they are paying you.

[tomrod]

Note: parent comment to my comment stealth edited, in case anyone else noted the difference in quote and comment.

Point understood regardless. Basically enterprise sales are unwilling to sell a product, would prefer to sell an associated labor cost.

My prioritization remains though. If you obfuscate price, I want as little to do with your product as possible.

[ushakov]

it might look like a terrible practice, but in reality it actually is a funnel

if you don't have serious money lined up (typically 5-6 numbers minimum) sales won't bother with you anyways

sometimes pricing can't be easily calculated and there might be many factors and even some custom agreements in place (like SLAs), which do add up the cost substantially

in my own projects, however i always list minimum commitment for every tier

but only because i don't have enterprise sales team

[detaro]

I don't care about having enterprise sales as much as about the "hide stuff behind bubbles" design, but it's still also interesting that here we talk a scenario where you easily could reach the "call enterprise sales" point with <$1000 monthly spend, which feels kind of absurd. One can hope the answer is an uncomplicated "ok, we'll unlock more contributors for another $20 per person", because anything else would be a waste of sales-people-time, but still...