Show HN: We built PriceLevel to find out what companies pay for SaaS (pricelevel.com)
Hey HN! Christine and Steven here. As a PM and engineer, we’ve both evaluated and purchased a lot of software. One of the biggest frustrations was figuring out how much it would cost us without having to go through the sales process. When we did have a quote, we had no idea if we were getting a good deal or ripped off.
We built a site where you can see what other companies are actually paying for SaaS and enterprise software. Buyers contribute prices via quotes, pricing proposals, and other documentation to ensure quality.
We unlocked Talkdesk for Show HN users so that you can use the product without needing to sign in or upgrade. Check it out at https://www.pricelevel.com/showhn. Would love to hear any feedback, thank you!
184 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 204 ms ] threadFor even more privacy you could show faceted aggregates with error bars instead of individual accounts once your samples are big enough.
I don't care if it's $91,132 or $90,725 or $91,412 - all of those are effectively the same as $91k (unless I'm the vendor trying to work out who's leaking my pricing).
What I'm looking for as a potential new customer is to see if it's going toi cost me ~200k or ~90k or ~10k or ~3k.
731 seats @ $77492.32 could be ~700-750 seats at ~$75k-$80k and that's still a useful guide for me.
A lot of estimations are done with "t-shirt sizes", and just knowing a rough range with a rough margin of error makes things so much easier. I'll let my procurement team fight for the $3k or 31 user difference, and do the back and forth with quotes, but I can run w/ those broad numbers right now
Also contract length. Pretty common to get deep discounts with multi year agreements.
And definitely! We do have contract length, though that's locked away as a Pro feature
I'm curious how you look at that? Are there any legal risks for end users to share this type of information via your site? I'm thinking if the SaaS providers have some legal statements about not sharing prices (similar to how certain database providers don't allow sharing of database benchmarks).
While there may be some SaaS companies who don't like this level of transparency, we hope this actually leads to a faster sales cycle because buyers have pre-qualified themselves.
But by obfuscating their pricing they are able to create a marketing "lead" when you contact them that will one day evolve into a client and therefor its better for them to "pre-qualify" you.
I personally hate this model as it drives me absolutely insane to spend a month of going back and forth with a vendor, going over what i'd like to do and why, investing time in understanding their stack and product, only to find out its 2x my budget or something like they wont even consider me since its less than 10k. If you hide your pricing, make me go through an extensive process, and I let you know im trying to implement a PoC or a small entry level and you come at me with $1k/month I'm likely going to walk away and be frustrated enough to not want to do business with you ever. You've created more of a negative experience that i will tell others about than a "lead". Yet this goes against every companies thinking (even my won) so it must work on someone.
... to see if I can replicate the important parts of your SaaS for my needs, then open source it or start a competitor with a sane and transparent pricing structure to capture the rest of the market like me.
Unless "$91,132" is an indicative but somewhat randomised number, I'd strongly suggest listing that as "$91k" to reduce the information leakage about which customer gave you that number. (Same with the number of seats, although it looks like there's less entropy in this numbers at a quick glance.)
Happy to answer any other questions you have around price or Vendr in general. If you create a free account, we're also happy to provide a free Premium Onboarding session to help you understand everything about the product. Feel free to email me if you have any other Qs :) emily dot regenold @ vendr dot com
However, as a provider I can totally see a situation where I (proverbially, I'm not in this business) sue you for disclosing what amounts to a trade secret (depending on what's in the fine print) and compel you to give up all documents so I can go after my loose-lipped client too.
I hope you've got your legal bases covered
This is with the obvious caveat that public tenders are the exception, but only after it's awarded
You'll see there's some cited court cases that supported pricing as a trade secret, and some that held it was not.
It seems to be still pretty muddy legally.
I've found in competitive price analysis there's some companies that do very, very, well at hiding their pricing. If they've worked that hard, that long, to protect/hide pricing they're not going to take it lying down.
Not making a value judgement and happy to be corrected if this is not a thing.
The FTC is going to render contractual terms negotiated in good faith between well-represented and sophisticated commercial buyers “just because”?
If a big buyer wants better terms, the seller might give it to them under the condition the pricing info isn’t leaked, spoiling the rest of their market. Otherwise they don’t give it. So the buyer agrees to confidentiality to get the best terms. There’s zero chance the FTC gets in the middle of this kind of negotiation.
I think that would be unlikely to go anywhere with the current FTC though.
Because without price transparency, markets do not work (microecon 101, prices are the signals from which supply and demand curve movements are determined). How can participants in a society determine where to allocate supply of resources without being able to see prices?
And making markets work more efficiently should surely be in the purview of the Federal Trade Commission.
(1) https://www.lplegal.com/content/what-are-trade-secrets-and-h...
Is there a basis for this in recent case law? And how difficult would it be to enforce against a 3rd party actively publishing pricing, and therefore competitive, strategy?
Nope I'm not staying they should shut down or they will get sued, but they should do the sensible thing and talk to a good lawyer
prices wouldn't be enforceable because knowing how much you charge isn't revealing anything proprietary (because you have to tell your customers in order to get them to make a decision).
Also not exactly possible to expect confidentiality around prices because your banks and their staff will see it..
But I can argue that pricing is part of my strategy and revealing pricing information in cases where I explicitly forbade it is potentially damaging because it allows a competitor to undercut me. I'd be surprised if they do go after a client, but my concern for these guys is they are not a client. They are an aggregator of this information. If any of these quotes were given with the caveat that pricing should not be shared, then a named company who's on the pricier side might have a good leg to stand on arguing this site damaged their business with what amounts to a trade secret (pricing strategy). At three very least or could result in a letter and headaches. Asking for who gave the information is something I would totally see too, especially if this was a client who jumped ship, if anything else just as a scare tactic/revenge
So, allows them to compete with you...
IANAL, and don't know how the law actually applies to this, but prohibiting customers or potential customers from disclosing price information clearly seems anti-competitive to me. And in some ways it is even worse than giving you an advantage for you over your competitors, if all your competitors also keep pricing a trade secret. In that case it gives you and your "competitors" an advantage against the customer, because the customer can't effectively compare prices, at least without expending considerable effort, which can result in the customer paying more. Especially for smaller companies with less negotiating power.
There's a big difference between seeing data in the course of your job, and being legally able to share it!
Something can’t be a trade secret if it’s not a secret at all, and if you’re the seller, and the information is a description of something someone else did (ie how much the buyer paid) then it’s not your secret to defend.
Not being allowed to expose the buying price of a service would go against many of these procedures/obligations.
We could look at it the same way disclosing one's salary can't be illegal: how do you then apply for a loan for instance ?
Source: I'm a 3L about to graduate with an IP specialization and got an award for being the best student in my trade secret law class.
- Ahern Rentals, 59 F.4th 948 (2023)
- Wilmington Star-News, 125 N.C. App. 174 (1997)
- Ingram, 260 Md. App. 122 (2023)
- Intertek Testing Servs., 443 F. Supp. 3d 303 (2020)
I’ll save myself the trouble of doing your research for you and ask if any of these involved a fact pattern where customers of a service sharing price info with each other is considered a trade secret.
Here’s a hint: if I am the customer and I am describing something that I myself did, specifically the outcome of a business decision I made on how much to pay, that’s not someone else’s trade secret.
You can make an argument that internal documents of a vendor are trade secrets, maybe. But you can’t say that a piece of information in the record of MY company, namely how much I decided to pay for their software, is a trade secret that belongs to someone else.
You’re learning how to be a lawyer quickly. It’s really common for attorneys to cite cases where the fact pattern doesn’t line up at all and hope nobody reads them. But if you are sure there is good precedent for this specific point then post it. I doubt that’s the case for the obvious reasons I outlined above.
You’re basically arguing that the act of purchasing renders the NDA void. Good luck with that.
For purposes of this Agreement, "Confidential Information" shall include any information, material, data, or know-how, including trade secrets and proprietary information, that is not generally known to the public and that is disclosed, either written or orally, to be or appears to a reasonable person to be proprietary or confidential.
The price that my company paid to purchase someone else's software was not "disclosed" to me. I created the information myself, when I made the decision to purchase it. The company didn't convey, transmit, or pass the information to me. My act of deciding to purchase the software created the information, which did not exist prior to my purchase decision, and it's information about me and my company's actions and by definition can't be someone else's proprietary data.
> Trial court did not err in finding the plaintiff took reasonable steps under the circumstances to maintain the secrecy of its trade secrets, including internal customer and pricing information, as required by MUTSA, CL § 11-1201(e)(2), where the plaintiff restricted access to the information on a company database; an employee handbook prohibited employees from removing sensitive categories of information
This seems very different from me getting a quote from you and then at a bar saying yeah XYZ enterprise plan costs $42,000/year
Our microsoft reseller was using pricing and contract info on a deal he closed last week to assure us he would and could get us a similar deal.
Gartner will literally cutthtoat re-negotiate any large contract you have, using pricing data they have gathered from their members.
Call them up tomorrow, tell them your current cost for Splunk, they will tell you exactly how much you can save.
So this type of thing is not illegal and not even frowned upon for the big players.
I personally hate it but it's just how the game is played and it's why all enterprise software has stupidly high advertised prices so they can give "90% discounts" and let people think that is a good deal when it is ultimately just the real price that all the big players are getting anyway.
I had to get a lot of quotes and talking to legal is painful.
This is ridiculous.
If there's one piece of information that is public by nature in a free market is price, folks.
We should bash on any business that tries to manipulate the legal system to destroy price publicity. They should be the ones in fear.
The whole concept of a market does not work without price transparency. The more price transparency, the more efficient the market.
Sure you may be able to find some unscrupulous attorney who will make the argument that you charging $5 for one thing and $6 for another is somehow a "trade secret" so they can keep on billing, but that's only "legitimate" in the sense that a dictator is legitimate because they hold power. Price transparency and discoverability is a bedrock tenant of free market capitalism and any market to the contrary should be viewed as a direct attack on the free market. It's about as un-American a thing as you can get.
I don't see this holding in court aside from the company needing to remove that info from the site.
You are not beholden to NDA you have not signed, and it woudld be employee that shared it breaking any agreements, not the company that then shared it.
If the data is only shared in an aggregate fashion, I doubt they can do much without a subpoena. And then what? Sue the website? Sorry, no. Section 230.
John Doe suits against anonymous customers?
Nothing requires PriceLevel to retain the PII of users… they can capture the data, validate, and flush the PII. “Sorry, we have no information about the contributor of this data.”
My sense is this will be the primary innovation of this service— how to get this info and keep it useful to end users without very much ability to vet it. Worth the effort.
How many TalkDesk customers do you suppose there are paying $91,132 for 62 users?
I'd guess TalkDesk know exactly who that is.
(I doubt that makes it any easier to prevail if they try to sue them, but I wouldn't want to be the customer negotiating next years contract wit them.
"Hi, it's TalkDesk account management here. Just letting you know your contract expires at the end of next month. Here's a new contract for the following 12 months, with the special for you pricing of $425,762 for your 62 seats. Hope to hear from you soon, and have a nice day!"
Regarding quality, we're manually reviewing every data point for credibility before making it available.
Now we need a similar thing that publishes database benchmarks in spite of DeWitt. Use a few standardized datasets and boom.
As an operator, I know a lot of SaaS agreements include language saying the customer will protect the vendor's confidential data including information about pricing. I doubt it's legal in the majority of the time for buyers to share this data. And if the buyer is sharing confidential data with you, you're likely taking on risk by sharing it publicly, even in aggregate form.
You could add something saying that the buyer agrees that they have the legal rights to share the information with you, to protect yourself. But at some point you should know that the majority of the time, even if that box is checked, they don't.
Sure, they get some good insight, but they don't know how many seats, what level of support, etc etc. They just see a transaction $X from company A -> company B.
> Buyers contribute prices via quotes, pricing proposals, and other documentation to ensure quality.
Stop using words that makes it sounds like a crime. It’s a survey. Nobody is under any legal requirement to provide correct info.
A review is arguably just a "survey" as well, but if you provide incorrect info (ie. lie) you can be sued for defamation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood#In_the_Un...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsidian_Finance_Group,_LLC_v....
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_publ...
In the US, can other fictive persons sue for defamation too? If I walk around in a US city with a sign claiming that Barney the dinosaur stole diapers from orphans and use hard drugs, is that legally defamation? Or is it restricted to fictions used to name and organise economic activity, is it money and bookkeeping that creates this particular personhood?
>In the US, can other fictive persons sue for defamation too?
The case law is pretty clear that yes, corporations can sue for defamation. As I mentioned before, you can find plenty of appellate-level cases where corporations have sued others for defamation. The fact that nobody has seriously tried to have such cases quashed on account of "corporations are fictive persons" or whatever suggests that it's not a serious legal argument worth considering. Arguing over this makes as much sense as arguing whether driving a car counts as "traveling" and whether that's protected by the constitution or not[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_citizen_movement#Tra...
If you think it's fine and dandy that fictions are treated as if they're real in courts, that's just like your opinion, man.
Where I live, fictions aren't treated that way. The closest thing we have is immaterial rights, copyright and the like, 'protecting the fruits of spiritual labour'.
1. it's not just "like [my] opinion, man", it's how the legal system works in the US and most common law jurisdictions. You thinking otherwise makes as much sense as the people who think they don't need driver's licenses because they're not "driving", they're "traveling".
2. It sounds like you reject the concept of corporate personhood entirely. That's fine and all, but it's weird to bring that up when talking about tangential topics (eg. whether you can be sued for providing false information). It's even more weird to bring it up in a manner that suggests you're describing how the legal system works, rather than your opinion on how it ought to act.
>Where I live, fictions aren't treated that way
And what jurisdiction is that?
Given you can be sued for leaving a negative review [2] it seems entirely accurate you could get sued for leaving a false pricing info.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraud
[2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/10/can-you-get-sued-over-a-nega...
further more to win the case the other company will have to prove that 1) the document were fake, and that we faked them, and 2) that it doesn't match their real pricing, which means sharing that pricing info with the court and the other party. sure boss, sue me, and tell everyone what your actual pricing structure is, on the record, and at risk of contempt of court. that could be far more damaging than than any actual blowback from people making up numbers on the internet.
hell, post how expensive my product is, so that when I discount it heavily to future customers they think they're getting a sweetheart deal. "oh that quote was for a customer who wanted several bespoke features added, so it was expensive for them. but it helped mature the platform :)"
If it was all free, I suppose they'd have to reduce whatever friction they have in authenticating data input (I'm assuming they ask to see invoices or contracts for now), and run the risk of competitors pricing eachother up or just bad data being entered.
iPhone SE2.
Keen to use this. Having just been through the dance to obtain Drata, I’d love to just know the price ahead of time.
I know there was a YC company many years ago that “negotiated saas pricing as a service”.
The pain is not just knowing the price, it’s also: - what features and versions of features are included in why I’m paying for??
- what is the value of the extra bs that’s being packaged in, and can I negotiate it away? Or how can I make use of it?
I feels there’s a lot of value in a community of recent buyers of a product being able to communicate openly. Any company that takes actions against their own customers for trying to make the most of their product should be replaced.
SaaS sales can be guilty of drive-by sales, where the implementation fails to reach promises.
It puts a black eye too often on good products.
A suggestion - I cannot tell if the pricing is per contract/per month/per year etc. Would be great to be able to collect all this info and then slice and dice it.
You can also give companies an opportunity to reply to a post.
I also looks like they recently released a tool concretely to allow for privacy preserving benchmarking[1]. (I haven't looked into the the contents of the repo itself to check whether they are actually using zero knowledge proofs).
[0]: https://sine.foundation
[1]: https://github.com/sine-fdn/sine-benchmark
How would you prove that a submission is not truthful? You can check if it's an outlier but that's definitely not foolproof.
now this is what I come to HN for
For us, every customer has pretty unique, so even two feature sets that look the same might have wildly different support agreements.