I worked for enterprise software companies for a number of years.
I’m not personally a fan of “call us” pricing, but it is indeed effective, and the companies that sell software this way do so because they prioritize establishing human relationships between a salesperson and the buyer.
In the long run, this leads to more sales/upsells.
Also not only just establishing human relationships, sometimes software might not be available at all for plug and play and require client level tuning to be effective. Even in cursor, setting up a good .cursorrules seems to have quite a big effect.
I don't think "call us" is an effective inbound sales tactic though, but Mistral does have folks in sales who can do outbound sales.
This is a key point. A customer that buys $100K+ worth of software is automatically a future debook risk if they can't/don't implement it successfully and start seeing value right away.
The high touch approach ensures they're getting support at every step of the way and increases the chances that they'll use the software and renew later.
I'm not sure how many of these factors are in play for Mistral, but to your point, it's easy to imagine some scenarios.
This is a fairly cynical way to frame this. There is absolutely bad behavior in the enterprise software space, but that is certainly not universal, and is not inherent to the "call us" approach.
> If you're too small, they won't even talk to you.
This is often true. Some of the software I worked on was extremely expensive to host, and there was indeed a minimum threshold that was many multiples of $10K.
It's not that the company didn't want smaller players to use the software, but that smaller players just weren't large enough to benefit from the minimum buy-in, and selling the software at a lower cost for those smaller customers would have just been pure loss. Over time, they were able to lower the minimum threshold due to improvements in the architecture and economies of scale, but the point here is just that these minimums often exist for good reasons.
> Knowing your client happens regardless of showing pricing or not.
It really does not. Many software companies have a minimal relationship (if any) with their customers. For some customers and some product types, this is perfectly fine. But when a company is buying software that will cost the company millions/year, having a direct line to a real person who in turn can arrange conversations with product management, customer success, etc. is table stakes, and is often not possible or available with smaller vendors.
You can dislike the model, but I'd suggest digging in to some of the why before dismissing it too reductively.
dismissals of negative reactions as 'cynical' rarely acknowledge the fact that a 'cynical' response is often no more cynical than the cynicism of the target.
bespoke pricing is a cynical tactic, no matter how you dress it up. it provides a legal shroud, and i've no more patience in me to give the benefit of the doubt to any profit-motivated enterprise that can't at least be upfront about what they want to charge for their services.
I think you overestimate the degree to which some software can be standardized and sold in a set of well-defined SKUs, and the degree to which some buyers want to be intimately familiar with extremely granular pricing (e.g. something like AWS).
Again, speaking only for the places I worked, part of the reason pricing wasn't simple was that larger customer deployments were tuned to the customer based on a myriad of factors ranging from the specific software modules the customer purchased, use cases they intended to deploy and the load characteristics of those use cases, etc.
Setting aside for a moment any potential bad behavior, the bottom line is that for some kinds of software, bespoke pricing is a more accurate reflection of the reality of the deployment than trying to force some kind of standardized label on it. The places I worked also had pricing books they'd show customers, but due to their complexity, they would not publish these publicly.
> bespoke pricing is a cynical tactic, no matter how you dress it up
We'll have to agree to disagree. Having worked with quite a few large vendors over the years, there are clear and obvious differences between them, better and worse reasons for this type of pricing, and there's a reason that some companies have earned a negative reputation while others have not.
It's also not clear to me why you've concluded that this is all inherently cynical.
I think your argument is supported by the fact that many companies, in and outside of AI, have pricing upfront. That's for cloud platforms, OS's, frameworks like Sciter, shrink-wrap, semi-custom with value adds ("starts at..."), per-token pricing on models, etc.
Then, some companies wont give the slightest hint of pricing unless we talk to their paid salespeople. It's definitely a game to extract more money out of you. While they may or may not, they often ignore low-volume customers who could easily buy the product if it was on an online store. Your skepticism is warranted.
> While they may or may not, they often ignore low-volume customers who could easily buy the product if it was on an online store. Your skepticism is warranted.
Setting aside any qualms about how the pricing is published, if a business chooses a strategy in which they focus on large customers and choose not to take on small customers, why is this an issue? Especially when the market is filled with alternatives?
The support model, predictability of yearly renewals, per-customer overhead, etc. look quite different when selling to larger customers vs. small/low-volume customers.
It depends on one's moral philosophy. One kind would see it as discrimination with a negative, long-term impact on people and markets. Others would say they can do whatever they want. Subjectivists and capitalists would encourage them to do so to maximize selfish gains, esp money and power.
If about selfish gain, then you should have no concern with people calling out their practice to warn others. They're doing what they want to do. They're also helping others with a warning to avoid harms, like lock-in and overcharging, that are more likely with "call us for a quote" type companies. The warnings are also market signals for buyers.
In my case, I also tell people to encourage good practices like having prices up. Posts like mine might also inspire regulations that force prices to be shared ahead of time. They might also inspire people to use or develop lock-in-free alternatives which some out there are doing.
If you're buying actual business critical software, you always want a signed contract. Even if they have transparent pricing and a checkout form. Most of these services will reserve the right to terminate service if they detect any violation of terms. A signed contract usually precludes them from doing that.
I buy Enterprise software too and unless there is a good reason (there are no other alternatives, or I have complex requirements), I'll also quite often negatively factor being dropped into a sales funnel, with all it entails.