[EricMausler]

I specialize in costing/pricing, not in saas however. There are a lot of reasons why what you are asking for is likely not realistic. It unfortunately does get abused, though, and I fully agree with how bullshit some of the arrangements are. It's just the people taking advantage of the situation are doing so knowing that the "cover" for it is legitimate.

Maybe there are ways to address the abuse without forcing upfront pricing?

[pooloo]

Cost/pricing is similar enough to a salary, why is it not realistic to have these costs front facing? I can't see anything positive from the consumer perspective with hiding the numbers. The business side, there is always a reason to hide things.

[EricMausler]

I think demanding upfront pricing could hurt the customer. The company would be forced to overestimate their costs to cover the risk associated with unknown use-case details, making the enterprise price inflated. There would be a big "**" next to the price as well with a long list of conditions that need to be met.

The true costs are not front facing because it may not be clear which part of your product is going to be bearing most of the weight of the enterprise customers use-case until you know exactly what they are buying. Your costs may change a lot based on the nature and scale of what they are buying.

For example, you may be rate limited on a background service they use and the customer usecase will likely pish you over your limit. the next product tier from the background service vendor that's required to fulfill the enterprise company's use-case may cost way more and offer way more capacity than that company is going to use by itself. So you have to make a bet on how much cost to assign to that customer, and how much to assign to other/future customers given you buy that new tier and use it to change what you offer to other customers to try to make use of it. It may lower your cost overall if it supports a feature you can upsell relatively easily. Or it may be a service hardly used at all andyou really can't justify going up to that next tier unless this one enterprise customer pays for nearly all of the added cost