[davewritescode]

The high price of Hashicorp doomed them in the end. I don’t know what their financials looked like internally but the quotes we got from sales reps got them laughed out of the room.

[placatedmayhem]

I had the same experience some years ago. When we told them they were out of their minds and they wouldn't budge on price, the sales rep came back after a few months pleading to get us back to the table because we would have been a gigantic sale and a foothold into the other orgs of the large company I worked for at the time. We told them we already had a different solution in flight because of their original failure to negotiate.

[kstrauser]

Thirded. Some of their products looked useful so we talked to a sales person, and it was exorbitant. Not "oof, that's a little more than I'd budgeted for", but "LOL does that include equity?" The upside is that it pushed us to check out the alternatives.

AWS Secrets Manager isn't as nice as Vault in a lot of ways, but at a starting price of $0.40/mo for 1 secret + as many clients as you'd want vs $1250/mo for a standard vault + 1 client, it's fine.

[FooBarWidget]

Okay but how much does that really say? All HN/startup advice says that when you sell to enterprises you have to charge enterprise prices. Meanwhile techies are notoriously for preferring to spend a month's worth of salary building an FTP server to replace Dropbox with.

[empath-nirvana]

Hashicorp's prices are not what i'd consider to be 'enterprise prices'. When we looked at buying "enterprise vault" a few years ago it was six figures a year for a relatively small install. It was basically "we don't want your business" pricing.

[nottorp]

> All HN/startup advice says that when you sell to enterprises you have to charge enterprise prices.

HN/founder culture is a bubble though.

And the original statement was Joel's and said you have to either charge something that the lowest level manager can approve on their own OR enterprise pricing. Basically you can charge $30 or $3000 but not $300.

[Sayrus]

I remember seeing quotes for Hashicorp Vault Enterprise, the price for Vault dwarfed the entire cloud bill of the company. And yet the cloud bill (through the marketplace) included other third-parties that were being paid an "enterprise price".

[davewritescode]

I can tell you that I worked at a large company that was moving pieces like identity and secrets management to SaaS or open source solutions years after rolling their own and failing to keep up. I'm well versed in built vs buy vs opensource.

For the record, Hashicorp vault was 10x the cost of our fully managed Identity system for a million+ unique logins a month.