| > 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. |
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.