Tell HN: Please let me just buy stuff without having to “Contact Sales”
Context: I'm trying to buy an API for Text-To-Speech. There's a few that look promising but I can't really try them out without going through a sales guy first. All I'm going to tell them is that we want a short trial where I can check out the quality for myself in our specific use case.
It's frustrating that I need to wait for our calendars to align and to sit on a call to do this.
I don't need the sales pitch, it's an extremely straightforward concept, and I'm likely to choose whichever one lets me build an MVP the fastest.
84 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadI'm grateful for these companies putting it out there ahead of time.
> It's frustrating that I need to wait for our calendars to align and to sit on a call to do this.
It is 2023, there should be a self serve tier for all SaaS products. A call sales only service smells like an MVP to me.
I wouldn't say this is an unsolvable problem. Sometimes you can build the product in a way that better aligns with your desired pricing model, and other times you can set up some implicit price discrimination in a way that feels more honest than scammy. But is that where your company's limited time and effort is best spent? Often the answer is no.
Providing self service tier is not free for the company.
You still get support tickets from free tier users. It is also not only building self service flow but maintaining it updating code/documentation.
Let alone that it is common knowledge that free users are the worst.
Not free but self service paid - who is going to sign up for 5k starting fee and then 1k/month?
That is still fairly low for enterprise tier.
What people expect is self service tier $100 a month or less. Which by corporate standards is essentially free tier.
When we wanted for our company get specialist from one vendor that has free tier they quoted $5k/day.
My main point still stands.
For some 10k * $100/m customer might be of interest, if there is little support required. I think for a simple "API" type service this could work.
For others they want 100 * $10k/m and they are offering a rich service with in depth support.
A middle ground is provide indicative pricing for enterprise plans, provide documentation so the end users can decide if this will work for them before contacting sales.
A big challenge with self-serve is the ability to accurately price without any prior context: there's a dance between service providers and service customers, where the service provider is trying to maximise revenue and the customer wants to pay the least possible. Selling to a human, after discussing their needs and budget, makes it much easier maximise revenue from that customer.
A good lesson to take from this experience is that just because you want a service, does not mean you're the target customer of every company selling that service. If you're unable to find the experience you need from one service provider, you should absolutely move on to the next -- nobody is going to take offence :)
Because it’s not usually engineers I’m taking to, it’s directors and managers.
If you’re a startup and I have enterprise pricing, I likely don’t prioritize you.
I like how this response unapologetically lays bare a coarse reality of software.
Programmers only see steady paychecks; they don't appreciate where the money comes from.
That said, obviously we’re all in this together, and the paychecks come because we’re all doing the work.
It's absolutely valid that you can focus your attention towards the juicy targets, but there are likely more apples than expected that will hit the ground.
Then they sold to Enterprise, governments, and had to face compliance queries.
On the phone -> $0, as they're not going to call
Easy self-managed sign up -> $some, as this is what they're willing to do
Whether or not that makes sense is another matter.
there are so many layers for these companies before they can buy anthing above a certain threshold its insane.
data privacy/compliance questions alone make this insanely difficult
I've lost count of the number of times this happened to me for moderate-to-large / organization-wide purchases.
Unless you somehow expect that a director never assigns a lackey at short notice, and always does this kind of research themselves, giving themselves oodles of time for a decision, because they enjoy the exhilirating experience of spending hours upon hours on the phone with salespeople.
There's probably a good chance of a non-trivial amount of survivorship bias going on before you even reach the tip of the iceberg that is the "I only end up talking to directors and managers" observation.
The people who look for quotes in organizations that are likely to want to be targeted by the company are themselves salespeople and business development employees, not developers, who know how "contact sales" and the sales pipeline in general work.
In other words, it is mutual self selection that benefits both parties. All others outside of that range need not apply.
As a developer, I've been tasked with doing this probably two dozen times in my career at various companies. It's not that rare. And yes, having to talk to a salesperson to get an idea of the cost gets that offering crossed off my list immediately.
Those companies have lost fairly large sales because of the practice.
Think of the alternative, a startup focuses on scaling their signup/payment flow, and have to sacrifice time-to-market and reduce the amount of time they're actually talking to customers and working on the product...
To me it means they don't understand their own product or customers, since they can't list a price for the typical use case.
We also vary the price based on school size. Huge research-1 level schools pay more than tiny public liberal arts schools -- and rightly so. The big schools have more funding and more spare cash. They also have bigger, more complicated implementations since they have 50+ thousand students and hundreds of faculty. The size of the school also feeds into how expensive the customer is going to be to service, and thus affects our pricing.
How do I put all that into a single price on the website?
There you go. Honest businesses don't make their prices with regards to how much "spare cash" their client might have.
> How do I put all that into a single price on the website?
You divide it into parts that can be priced. If there is a bespoke part you put an hourly rate for that implementation, or daily rate, or any way of counting the rate that suits you.
You can use the projects you have finished to publish examples for future potential clients, where they can compare a little bit and get a rough idea of what it would cost them.
Just getting any kind of price information out there is much better than nothing, because then a potential client knows if it's within their range. You also avoid people who cannot afford your product.
Yes they do. This is indeed how supply and demand works, companies price what the market is willing to pay, it's just that in this case, the market is a clientele of 1.
I just wanted to back GGGP's judgment of vendors who adjust pricing according to customer pocket depth. While I'm at it, your claim that individuals are markets unto themselves is also risible.
Let's say we charge everyone the "big customer" rate.. The smaller customers couldn't afford it. If we charged everyone the "small customer" rate, we'd put ourselves out of business by spending far too time on the big customers while not making enough revenue to cover the costs of serving the larger customers. If we're practical about it, the smaller customers just don't have budgets as large as the larger customers. If we want the smaller customers to buy in, we have to reduce the price to something that fits their budget.
Not really. Some people will, sure, but most people will assume they can't afford it (which, if they have to ask, are correct).
> The wast majority of businesses who don't publish a price are not serving enterprise clients.
Where are you getting this information? The reason to expend time and energy with salespeople doing personal demo calls is to get enterprise clients, otherwise it's a waste to do all of that for someone paying a 100 bucks a month.
> Where are you getting this information?
For every business big enough to serve enterprise, there are hundreds of small businesses who serve the general public. It's common that they don't list their prices.
Not really me wanting to be right, I gave you a few examples of people self selecting out of the target market while you haven't really given me any evidence for your statement, that's all I'm saying.
> It's common that they don't list their prices.
Could you provide an example? I usually only see those who are targeting enterprise to have wording about contacting sales. At the very most I'll see startups have pricing tiers and the last tier is called Enterprise and the button says contact sales.
All of those consumer-targwttimg businesses without exception had "contact sales to get a quote".
I was expecting to face a sleazy upsell pitch, but all of those I contacted had a simple fixed price list covering each unit size after you contacted sales. It was just a way to force the prospective customer to call up first, amd to avoid publishing their price list.
The time spent on calls was annoying because I was in a hurry while comparison shopping, but there wasn't any upsell pitch. There was a surprising amount of information given by the vendors on those calls which ruled out their facility from being useful, though. Things they should really have included in the FAQs on their websites. Eg "24x7 access" on the website banners meaning."sorry 24x7 is not offered at the unit in your town because it's in a town centre, access is 9 to 4:30 only" after you called, if you remembered to ask
I disagree. It makes me think that they're focusing on the hard sell rather than the quality of their product.
Sure, if I eliminate other choices for this thing and you're the only one left I'm gonna ask a non-technical person in my company to cut through the bullshit and contact sales, to get me what I want, but otherwise, if there are other good choices, you are gonna miss my business.
We don’t need to beg people to behave properly. We simply ignore them when they don’t. They can go flail and fail all day.
Sometimes I need a solution in hours. And when I “contact sales” it’s days or more before I get and email or call back. My time is worth more than your product in almost every case.
Either they have plain and simple pricing or its just a bullshit dance with sales team.
Choose wisely.
Often the product is not worth the dance ...
For example if you look for singing voice, they might suggest you an adapted model that is good specifically for singing.
The testing process is also not very straight, you need to understand what to test and how to test properly. For example, some of their voices might be better for questions, some for news.
You'd better talk to them.
With GitLab, the sales team kept trying to show me demos of their product I already know. For months they kept trying to steer the conversation towards CI/CD when I had a completely different topic I wanted to focus on.
> Sell "one size fits all" usage scaled billing
> Don't hire a sales team
> Large companies won't do business with you since they cant negotiate or engage with a sales team to make sure the product fits for them
> A thousand small users sign up and pay 1$ per month before credit card and merchant fees, misuse the product and want a refund, and throw tens of thousands of support requests at you
You now have a less than worthless sales model.
it's more that every sale is a complex sale that makes it difficult or lossy to advertise a flat rate.
That or the price is a competitive advantage and they are trying to mitigate a race to the bottom
What is your budget? It's likely a situation of "if you have to ask, you cannot afford it."
The opportunity cost for a larger firm to serve a startup may exceed the likely three year revenue you can offer.
Being on the other side of the table (running a SaaS requiring a call scheduled), I have do this because my SaaS its in an early stage, the call allows me to understand the customer needs and make a proposal when we are a good fit. In this particular case, it is hard to get a quote when I don't know the necessary customization that could be required.
The call is a friction point that I'm trying to avoid by communicating example integrations and its prices in the landing page, still, making everything clear hasn't been simple.
In short, asking by email could be a good idea.
I realize it might not be a fair assessment, but it is always where my brain goes. And then I move on, to a competitor. I only contact sales if you are literally the ONLY one with what I need. But that is rare.
"Contact sales" is a practice seen everywhere, not only from those serving large enterprises. A lot of small time and B2C websites do the "Contact sales" thing, so all the arguments here that OP is unimportant as a customer falls completely flat. There are only two reasons to not post any price:
1. You don't understand your own business and have to bring out the calculator and spreadsheet in order to know what price to offer a customer.
2. You're trying to rip off the customer.
If huge companies like Stripe can list a price, then you can too. But one of the reasons above stop you. I've seen exactly how these "Contact sales" people operate in their in-person meetings and it's always the same: A lot of sales tricks to try to sell an underperforming product for an extremely bloated price. Which of course can work if the person responsible for the purchase is not the business owner and can be convinced by wining and dining, getting a prostitute or getting a bribe. But those times are rapidly coming to an end.
Putting a price out there means any potential customer can know your price range before entering in contact to discuss special solutions. In my field of work most competitors advertise in the vein of "We can make the perfect solution for you, just contact sales" and have no price published. We have several ready made solutions with clear pricing as well as invitations to contact sales for special solutions. Guess which model actually works?
I also believe this is an age thing. People below a certain age know that no listed price means it is always a fraud. They will instantly discard such companies.
I'm a graybeard, and I think this way as well. Or, even if it's not a fraud, having no listed price means, at the very least, that I'll have to talk to a salesperson -- which is to be avoided as much as possible.
We ended up remaking our own solution for one of them and open sourcing the code because development was 10x (maybe even 100x) cheaper than purchasing at their predatory pricing schemas.