Ask HN: SaaS pricing pages with high prices and not “contact sales”

londons_explore|2 years ago

I run https://serverthiefbait.com/ and the highest plan is $900 (not recurring). However, nearly everyone who buys that plan seems to mail me with special requests, which I usually do for free but probably should switch to a 'contact sales' model and decide the price based on the customers needs.

It's usually things like "can you help us with automation to roll this out to every one of our users home directories", or "we want every wallet tagged with the computer name and path so we can respond quicker if theft is detected". Legit requests, but not features built into the built-in-a-weekend service.

spitfire|2 years ago

That's a really neat little business. I like it a lot.

TrueGeek|2 years ago

This is such a good idea. I’m going to sign up!

You’ve got a tiny typo (“age” is listed twice) in your fourth FAQ:

age, software version, file format, age

XCSme|2 years ago

Same thing for https://uxwizz.com

I never wake up to a random Agency $1500 sale, all high paying customers send emails and discuss their use-case before.

prakhar897|2 years ago

Curious, who is your target audience? I can't figure out whether you're selling to the CEOs or the Engineering Managers. and how do you target them?

victorbjorklund|2 years ago

Putting crypto as bait. Damn that is a good idea.

bombcar|2 years ago

Space-as-a-Service is the highest one I know posted

https://www.spacex.com/media/Capabilities&Services.pdf

btown|2 years ago

Along these lines: https://www.skyfi.com/pricing

mooreds|2 years ago

Whoa, that's awesome. Imagine all the points you can get by using a personal card and then expensing it. :)

mattew|2 years ago

I’m fine if you have a “contact us” for a true enterprise plan, but companies that have actual pricing plans should post them. I way prefer to buy from SaaS companies that display their pricing up front rather than trying to get me on the phone to talk with an account executive.

I’m not scared to pay serious money for a service, but putting your service behind a sales person is more than likely going to cost you my business.

wouldbecouldbe|2 years ago

That might be what you prefer; but just not how the world works. For large fees just a much higher likelihood of sales after a personal connection has been made

browningstreet|2 years ago

Having done SaaS and PaaS implementations for a bank, there were very few turn key enterprise contracts. They all went through redlining, addendums and custom enhancement processes and these negotiations usually took 3-12 months to complete (months just for an NDA). This is why you don’t see standard pricing.

ezekg|2 years ago

Mine goes up to $6k/mo: https://keygen.sh/pricing/. I started using transparent pricing a couple years ago because I was tired of answering the same questions over and over again for enterprise leads.

__natty__|2 years ago

Just fyi, I’m missing the previous dynamic logo

thebruce87m|2 years ago

We’re even more tired of the asking.

“Contact us” == “speak to us so we can gauge how much we can shake you down for”

tlogan|2 years ago

From my experience, anyone looking to spend more than $1000 per month will want to have a conversation with someone.

They might not require any additional features, but many companies will need an account manager's email address to enter into their procurement system.

So “contact us” helps both sides.

wussboy|2 years ago

But I still want to know what sort of a ballpark I’ll getting in to. Is it $1/month per user? Or $100? Hiding all prices behind “contact us” makes window shopping expensive to me and I’ll likely just move along.

derefr|2 years ago

What does "looking to spend" mean? As a CTO, I don't shop SaaS "looking to spend" any particular amount of money; service providers can charge amounts for their services that are multiple orders of magnitude (!) apart, so I keep a completely open mind about how much it might cost to solve my problem (and in fact what type of service I need to solve my problem.)

For example: if my problem is "my egress-bandwidth bills are too high and my servers are falling over from the traffic", I could pay Akamai "contact us" dollars a month (probably thousands; maybe more than my egress-bandwidth costs!); or I could — potentially, depending on what I'm serving — pay Cloudflare $0 or $20 per month, with very legible rules about what would qualify me for those free/cheap plans. These aren't the same type of service: one's doing static pre-caching, mostly of large assets; while the other is doing short-term read-through caching, mostly of small assets. But they both solve an egress-bandwidth problem; and if you have no other constraints, then they are effective replacement goods for one-another.

tauntz|2 years ago

We do a "starting from 2k" enterprise package on our pricing page @ https://emulator.wtf/pricing.

Internally, we do have a calculator for various "enterprise" tiers where you can throw in the specific resource amounts that you'd be looking for and it applies various bulk discounts etc and gets you a specific number. Maybe we should make that public as well instead of a generic "enterprise" package..

mooreds|2 years ago

I work for FusionAuth. You can buy our Enterprise plan online with a credit card: https://fusionauth.io/pricing?step=plan&hosting=ha-cloud

With one hosting environment, that comes to $3800/month (or more if you are in certain locales).

It's been done, but not often. More often folks at that price point want to talk to sales people to understand the product or perhaps do a POC.

People seem to appreciate the ability to shop prices, though.

thenerdhead|2 years ago

No not really. The reason why is because high prices require high touch points.

I believe you are asking if people show high prices up front for low touch point services. Sometimes they provide enterprise pricing.

jasondecastro|2 years ago

Mixpanel handles this pretty well: https://mixpanel.com/pricing

tacone|2 years ago

I remember Google analytics listing 150k/year for the enterprise offering, stating something along NG the lines: "we like simple pricing".

It was 10 years ago, I don't know if that has changed since.

lmeyerov|2 years ago

We provide a GPU visual graph AI platform that gets used by folks looking at relationships & correlations in their data (think cyber, fraud, social, supply chain, genomics), and came to this: https://www.graphistry.com/get-started

Many folks are individuals, or highly technical and do not want to engage, so they want to just try for themselves. Imagine a Splunk or Databricks analyst who likes to do notebooks on the side. On the other end, we'll have architects planning say a $1M or $20M data project for the next few years of their dept's data arch, and want to really think through scaling.

So we split between free/cheap self-serve SaaS, where people can just go without thinking about any infra etc, to the more enterprise self-hosting tier where they can run in their own cloud, and decide whether they like to do on their own (ex: very clear & immediate task), and when they want to talk about GPUs, graphs, AI, LLMs, etc., and how that can accelerate or solve some of the harder problems they're ultimately tackling, they have a way to reach out and we can share our experiences from similar orgs.

For louie.ai, we're basically preparing to do the same. It's possible to optimize on this stuff for enterprise teams, but we don't see much of a need: when we're solving a real enterprise problem, and are speaking our users language via our public talks, blogposts, etc, they'll check the page to make sure the form factor can make sense and it's indeed in their problem area, and then they want to talk. When something is a top 3 priority for a dept, they'll be getting on zoom calls with multiple vendors, so just need to make it easy for them to do that.

Veuxdo|2 years ago

Atlassian Marketplace does this for all their 3rd-party apps, e.g. https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1229877/ilograph-inte...

You can put in any number from 1 to 50,000 users and get an exact quote. This is possible because there's zero additional setup for an app already in an ecosystem like this. Compare that to onboarding an enterprise to a SaaS solution, or an on-prem solution, which could be a significant amount of work depending on many factors.

arzig|2 years ago

FusionAuth: It’s a form but not onerous to get to some prices. The base plans can be quite a bit cheaper though. https://fusionauth.io/pricing

Klathmon|2 years ago

We recently found that the new artillery.io service is going to be something like $600 or $1200 a month.

It's not exactly front and center, and I think it's not fully released yet, but they do have the price in the FAQ which I respect.

mhluongo|2 years ago

Both Dune [0] and Nansen [1] in the cryptocurrency data analytics space have high monthly price points. Note that Nansen still has a "Contact Sales" button with a $2k / month price — I imagine this follows the "always allow someone to pay you more" advice I've seen across HN over the years.

[0] - https://dune.com/pricing [1] - https://www.nansen.ai/plans

rgrieselhuber|2 years ago

This is how we price: https://www.demandsphere.com/pricing/

Ylpertnodi|2 years ago

How do you fare with 'just' 14 free days? I always find that if I get busy, or life just gets in the way that 14 days isn't always enough. I have, though, with certain vendors, negotiated a certain number of hours that I have always used (and if I've not continued to use the product I've always provided honest feedback as to why not).

rgrieselhuber|2 years ago

Kinda curious why I’d be downvoted for directly answering the question.

andyandthevms|2 years ago

Wasabi S3 https://wasabi.com/cloud-storage-pricing/

ab_testing|2 years ago

https://www.oracle.com/mx/a/ocom/docs/corporate/pricing/orac...

htsh|2 years ago

supabase just added their $599 tier for their soc2/hippa compliant product. really appreciated that.

ishiz|2 years ago

Currents.dev has 12 pricing levels, ranging from $40/mo to $1170/mo, until you hit the "contact us" phase: https://currents.dev/#pricing

dewey|2 years ago

FWIW that's a horrible pricing page, so I'd not get too inspired by it.