Comment by griomnib
1 day ago
This sort of cuts both ways, I’m on the small business selling side.
Sometimes somebody will want a call, I’ll do my dance, tell them the price, then they try to nickel and dime to get a lower price - which isn’t on offer. That blows a lot of my time.
On the other hand, the software I sell solves some novel problems at scale and is designed to be extensible - so in cases where somebody wants to build on the foundation I’ve built I really do need a call to figure out if there’s a missing feature or similar I’d need to build out, or if there’s some implementation detail that’s highly specialized to a given situation.
By and large my evolving strategy is to not have a fixed price listed online, and to reply to emails promptly with pricing with offer to have a call for complex situations.
As someone else posted, SpaceX lists their prices to launch things into space. Your software situations are more complex?
That doesn’t seem like a logical inference to me.
A house construction contractor doesn't have a price list for the sake of obscuring prices, nor because house construction is more complex than space flight.
It's because houses are custom and thus prices are too variable to list in any meaningful way.
For a SaaS product with significant custom integration work, it seems reasonable that prices might also vary in the same way.
A small-scale contractor doesn't have a price list, but a real estate developer who builds an entire subdivision at a time definitely has a price list. There might be taxes and fees on top of that, but everyone expects that anyway. At least the base product should have a clear price tag.
If I can tell in advance whether your SaaS product costs $10/seat/mo or $100/seat/mo, I'll probably feel more comfortable asking whether the custom integration work will cost $50k or $100k.
There are many companies that charge “x” per weight of “y” to go from “a” to “b”. How they get “y” from “a” to “b” is complex, but the actual pricing is quite simple compared to bespoke business solutions. It’s just freight.
> SpaceX can provide unique interfaces for Payloads with mechanical interfaces other than 8", 15", or 24". The Sales team will contact you with pricing if you select this optional service.