[yamtaddle]

Don't forget that "contact us" pricing also gives vendor managers something to do, and the ability to brag about whatever discount they negotiate (and it hardly matters if everyone gets that "discount").

It's also the case that if something goes wrong the first question is often "do we have a contact at X?" and if you've gone through the "contact us" pricing dance, the answer is probably "yes", or at least "maybe', while if you use self-serve public-pricing plans, the answer is probably "no". Managers like having a named person to bug about problems, so the vendor manager gets to look more competent if they have one, even if the outcome's the same as if they didn't.

Besides, all pricing is "contact us" for enterprises. They don't pay what's on the sticker, even if there is one.

[autoexec]

> It's also the case that if something goes wrong the first question is often "do we have a contact at X?" and if you've gone through the "contact us" pricing dance, the answer is probably "yes"

If you pay for a product or service and when something goes wrong your only contact is some jerk in sales that means you fucked up bad. Support options and contacts should have been determined and documented long before you spend a single cent.

[yamtaddle]

You usually end up introduced to one or more highish-level support and/or integration engineers as part of the sales process. If their sales folks don't volunteer to drag one or more into the conversation, they probably will if you ask.

[chillfox]

Last time I had to deal with the contact at x due to something going wrong they were worse than useless. They broke the product with an update and when we asked to roll it back they organised a full sales team which was presented to us as a call with engineering, except they were trying to sell us on another product to solve a different problem and just ignored all questions about the product we had bought.