Comment by mrandish

> I found out that it wasn't holding for LLM pricing

You're correct. When a type of cloud service grows large enough and has a few competitive suppliers, enterprise pricing tends to coalesce with the large buyers paying around the same price for the same thing. While that might be lower than the publicly cited rate card, the private price similarly large customers pay ends up being similar.

One reason is that the very largest, long-term enterprise customers are so valuable, they can command MFN clauses ensuring no one else is paying substantially less for the same thing, then the rest of the rate card for smaller customers flows down from that. There's a strong disincentive for vendors to cheat or allow big disparities between similar classes of customers because the number of people involved on both sides of these deals is large enough that word will get around eventually.

Large scale enterprise sales and purchasing in a given sector tends to be rather circular. Account execs move to other vendors and call on the same customers, while purchasing agents can move to other customer firms. Personal relationships, reputation and credibility matter. Lying to screw a large customer over just to make one commission or quarterly quota can be a very bad long-term career move. Sometimes purchasing agents or executives quietly compare notes off-the-record with their peers from other similarly-sized firms. After dinner drinks at industry association meetings and trade shows can be quite productive in terms of verbally exchanging 'market insight' with peers.

When there are significant pricing differences, its usually due to different volume commitments, SLA/QoS guarantees, payment terms and other material factors which justify the difference. Source: been there, done that inside a top ten valley tech company. Once was in a meeting where a newly minted EVP tried to get a long-time senior account exec to pressure a huge customer by being semi-dishonest. The account exec schooled the EVP on the fact that the EVP could only make him unemployed for about 8 hours but that huge customer not wanting to work with him could make him unemployed forever. :-)