[nickpsecurity]

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.

[haswell]

> 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.

[nickpsecurity]

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.

[haswell]

> It depends on one's moral philosophy.

To make sure I understand your comment, are you saying that a company that sells a product with a $50K minimum buy-in — a number determined to be the threshold at which the company can recoup development costs and make a reasonable profit — is engaging in some kind of immoral behavior because it can only be purchased by larger companies?

> 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.

This is quite the false dichotomy.

There are many valid reasons to sell to specific customer segments/markets that do not amount to “we’re doing it because we want to”.

In the early days of 3D printing, such hardware was prohibitively expensive and primarily sold to businesses. Even now, there are classes of 3D printer that cost many multiples of $10K. It would be strange to classify this as discrimination vs. acknowledging the realities of the market and the fact that it only makes sense target specific customer types depending on the product.

> They might also inspire people to use or develop lock-in-free alternatives which some out there are doing.

Lock-in is orthogonal to this pricing structure. It sounds like your primary issue is with companies that behave badly and use dark patterns. I share those concerns. But those issues are not inherent (or limited to) to “Call Us” pricing.

[nickpsecurity]

Your post has good points. The problem is you're assuming a group that invested X and believes they have to charge Y to recover it. That this is fair and makes sense. (It mostly is and does.)

In fact, most AI suppliers ripped off other people to the tune of TB (copyright infringement), spent a lot on the training, and want to recover their costs only while denying content creators theirs. So, let's start with this being about massive infringement of something they sell to shift all value to themselves.

From there, they can sell only top dollar to enterprises or tiered amounts based on buyer income. The latter being discounts applied to a high, but reasonable, default price. Also, they can be open about this or call us for a quote.

There are companies that do the first. They often bundle features into Plus, Pro, or Enterprise deals to make those sells more straightforward. So, the AI suppliers could definitely do that. They dont have to but it would be good. Hence, me bringing it up where their employees read.

The other point creates asymmetric information between the seller snd the buyer in a way that only benefits the seller in a sellers' market. High-performance AI is probably a seller's market right now. Most writing on that says the asymmetry is bad for buyers by default. Also, goes badly for them more often than transparent pricing upfront. So, I call it out by default.

The only thing worse is if the terms of deals are kept secret. That enables and drags out abuses for longer. I cant find any pricing information on a lot of the AI offerings. That suggests they're doing that, too. If any NDA's on price or performance, stay away unless absolutely necessary.