As you already know, this is typical for "enterprise" software due to the idea that potential customers will immediately click away if the price seems too high, so you need to let your customer know what value is in your software before they immediately walk away.

One take-away from this is the old "if you have to ask, you can't afford it", and another is that they're automatically filtering out lower-value or price-sensitive customers.

However, an obvious counterpoint is that Atlassian built a multi-billion-dollar business around up-front pricing, and even seem to still offer that up-front pricing today.

As a general rule, any software which requires "contact us" is going to be somewhere between $50k and $750k, generally annually, (usually for a fully-loaded site license on the high end), but there are definitely exceptions above and below. Certainly there are companies in some industries (WorkDay, Oracle, SalesForce, etc) that are known for being extremely expensive, and there are certainly many companies that would like to get into an upper tier but just aren't quite there yet, and smaller startups (esp non-VC funded) are often on the low end.

The premise of your assignment is that the specifics of a customer situation don't affect price. For enterprise SaaS this is not the case. There is no "price list" there is structured negotiation that has many parameters, including:

Total likely value of the business relationship if solution widely adopted inside prospect

What options does winning this deal create? In particular what will the vendor learn and will this relationship open the door to new niches, segments, markets?

What is the value of a reference / testimonial from this particular prospect?

Two related blog posts for startups who need to manage an enterprise sales process:

https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2008/11/12/negotiate-the-level...

https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2013/02/16/price-based-on-your...

"Professional" subreddits, such as /r/MSP, as well as the Spiceworks community will have answers for some of those, depending on what kind of SaaS it is exactly. Ask, oftentimes (former) vendor reps or happy/unhappy customers lurk there and are happy to help you out, although their info might be outdated - but it may help for a first orientation.

(I, too, consider price-hiding the bane of my existence and wish I could get those days and months of lifetime back that I spend going through useless "demos" and "quick calls with an evangelist/key account manager/person who nopes out at the first technical question".)

Another strategy is that you prepare a long-ish text that you email to a - perferrably senior - sales contact at each company, ideally one that has been referred to you (again, the above-mentioned sources may help).

Just change the name and first line mentioning their product and outline that "due to internal restructuring" your company will decide yea or nay "on doing a PoC within the next three working days" (i.e. you don't have time to waste on demos), that you are already very familiar with their product in all details from an earlier job, in fact, you want to recommend to your CTO to buy it, and that you wish to receive nothing more than their current pricing for $detailedreqs asap. Be overspecific as to your reqs and specs, so they can't weasel out with "it depends".

You might need to go one or two rounds where they try and talk you into doing calls/demos regardless but they will often CC more senior or local reps whose contacts are not public and if you push back repeating what you said in your first email but shorter, they will usually relent, especially if there are competitors in the field and they're getting afraid that the lead may go cold.

This strategy works maybe about 78.3% of the time but will likely fail if the SaaS offering does require extensive and bespoke customisation for your organisation.

Good luck, I really don't envy you having to go through this, to me it used to be like running the gauntlet.

Unlikely you'll find any good source.

"contact us" pricing revolves around understanding the customer's use case deeply enough so that you can demonstrate maximum product value to them and then extract the most possible money. I despise it.

There's some interesting data in the debt proceedings for the event startup Pollen:

https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/the-scoop-pollen/

Some snippets on their debts, which you cold normalize for their ~150 employees:

- Monday.com: ￡515k

- AWS: ￡105k

- Airtable: ￡7k

I use the "if you have to ask the price in order to check whether you can afford it or not, you can't afford it, so don't ask" strategy.

The price-hiding tactic is a little rude: jewlery stores helped pioneer it, the idea being to get the customer hooked on the item before they think about price, and to imagine the largest number they might be okay with paying ahead of time, while simultaneously making them unsure whether it's too low or not.

I don't like dealing with companies who do that sort of thing and I worry what other curve balls they have in store later on. So I opt out.

The reason that you can use this on enterprise sales is that you are theoretically offering something that the enterprise needs, no matter how painful the process is -- and there are typically few competitors for them to turn to. Many of the competitors use the same tactic. Hence, we see it all over in that world.

There isn't a hidden price that is only shown in the sales funnel. But rather the price changes depending on the customer.

'Contact us' = 'give us enough information to accurately price the product for you.'

Best way to shortcut the process would be to work with a channel/var that has a majority of the items in their portfolio.

Contact Us Pricing has different meanings based on company size:

Newish Companies: they haven't been able to figure out how to price their product yet.

Growth Companies: We're revenue optimizing every deal.

"Sales Driven" (as opposed to "product driven): We have to justify the existence of our sales team.

Hyper competitive companies: I'm not publishing a price because someone will scrape it and beat us by $1.

Large Companies: Our pricing is a four-dimensional matrix with multiple elevators, and we need a team of people to figure out which spreadsheet and which tab to look up x and y to price your deal.

You likely won't get pricing information out of a company like this. It's safe to assume "Contact Us" is being used as shorthand for a price between expensive and absurdly expensive. Usually companies that do this offer some sort per-company rate based on what you need along with a bunch of additional services.

Hate to say it but you're basically only going to find out by going through the sales funnel. Some of them may even turn you down for simply saying "we're evaluating X and would like to know the price".

I tried looking for something like this but ended up doing over a month of sales calls and meetings.

One problem is probably that a lot of companies pull enterprise pricing out of their ass (or there's too many confounding factors that make it look like that), and the other big problem was already mentioned, they're trying to maximize your spending.

There are only three reasons: 1. To allow you to charge customers differently for the same product. 2. If you are offering a highly customized product. 3. To establish value for your product prior to providing pricing.

In my experience, #1 is by far the most common for a SaaS.

The rationale of "if you have to ask" falls apart because you could just put a high price on your site to filter out the cheapskates.

I also find that when evaluating a new product, my first click on their site is the pricing page. It is a semi-standardized way to quickly see the significant features offered without all the verbose prose that you'll find on the product pages.

One trick, just to ballpark this --- it probably worked better 10 years ago than today, but I checked a couple vendors and got results --- is to Google the vendor and "GSA price list" (for their FedGov pricing).

Don't B2B companies do something like RFPs where they do a request for pricing and give a boilerplate / generic usecase of number of users, number of requests etc and expect the companies to bid back on results?

Maybe something like that could help you / maybe there is a business opportunity there to do aggregated sales calls so these companies can be compared side-by-side (though they probably would give inflated rates like hospitals do because they know insurance will knock the prices down).

"Contact Us" is called value pricing in enterprise lingo. It means the price will reflect how much "value" the product will provide to your organization. If the product can provide $100M "value" for your company, they will be happy to charge you $10M for the product. That's why they need to talk to you, to find out how much "value" they can provide for you.

My SaaS has only "Contact Sales" pricing right now because I currently don't have the infrastructure set up to sell to you in any other way. If the SaaS companies are young, they may be in the same situation. You could get a good deal by clicking the button.

Generally, the less you charge, the more infrastructure is involved in collecting payment - metered SaaS companies can charge you in increments of a few dollars but are backed by complex billing software, while enterprise sales is an invoice from quickbooks (I'm exaggerating a little bit about the level of automation here, but it's close to this).

Personally, the price for my "contact sales" product is a lot less than a typical "enterprise sales" product, with the price range being $10-50k. Some other young SaaS companies I have heard of are lower than that. Conversely, established companies with a "contact sales" button tend to start at $50k/year and go up from there to millions.

If you take control of the process during the call, and tell them "no" if they give you BS, you can probably get a price.

I'd imagine surveys here could be useful (to you and to other searchers). But I'm not sure how accurate they'd be. If they list the price that way, it's likely to be highly variable for each client, possibly even with different contract/support terms by client.

But I feel your pain. Trying to compare preschool tuitions is a nightmare because they only want to tell you if you go for a visit.

I'm Ryan -- CEO and co-founder of Vendr.com (YCS19). Since YC, we've become one of the largest software buyers in the world ($2B+ spend processed; 15k+ transactions). But, here's what I don't understand -- why does a company like Vendr even need to exist?

Companies flock to us to buy software because they are fed up with "Contact Sales", opaque pricing, expiring discounts, and the games associated with sales. Buyers of software are rapidly opting out of sellers' sales processes, coming to Vendr, and asking us to do it for them. Sales is broken.

Today, sellers focus on creating sales processes that maximize the leverage and outcomes for the sellers. This creates friction resulting in avg 90 days sales cycles and 20-25% close rates for sellers. Not good. No wonder sales and marketing expense equals ~50% of revenue.

When Vendr's successful, we'll have fixed sales. No more games. Fair pricing, correct and fast buying decisions -- powered by data. This results in a win for the seller (lower cost acquisition; shorter sales cycles) and a win for the buyer (best products win; fair pricing).

LMK if you need help with any of the "contact us" pricing -- we can easily answer this for you. ryan@vendr.com

To be fair to the annoying "call us" pricing practice, on your end you need to have a ballpark idea of what you want, whether its number of seats, data size, or whatever the product is sized in. Having that makes the calls go faster and can help you and the salesguy save time if there isn't even a chance of a match.

Seems like a good side project. A database where people could submit their SAAS pricing in a Glassdoor like fashion.

This will normally depend on many factors. This is usually going to be the quantity of units and the level and availability of support, but could include other factors depending on the domain. Your initial "subscription" is generally going to be more than your renewal, sometimes way more.

If it is a COTS offering that is likely to be used in the US Govt, I recommend trying to find your product on GSA Advantage [0], but it is helpful to have the manufacturer's part number handy, which often takes a consultation with a sales entity. Good luck!

[0] https://www.gsaadvantage.gov/

It’ll be good for you to practice cutting these calls short so you can get your quote.

“Contact Us” Pricing == Highly Variable Pricing. I personally see it as them inviting me to hear them out then waste some of their time before making a deal more along the lines of my price guidelines. Im about 50% success rate id say.

End of month reports are always a good time, End of quarter even better, Triple witching week is the best. Sometimes you get lucky and some middle-manager-muckity-muck is only $X thousands from the bonus target... and thats when you find your deals. Start early and be prepared to wait.

> Is there a website or service that lists cost ranges for enterprise SaaS products?

Probably not. Have had good success in the past posting random stuff on reddit, like "I'm paying 12000 / core for Oracle, am I high? Is this common?" in r/sysadmin, and then having people correct me.

But for the most part SaaS ain't offer those prices online. Contact someone, set up time for a call, and get prices. This is why vendor managers, sales engineers, solution architects, etc. are a thing.

Best option is to have both. Some fixed starting prices and then Custom/Enterprise/Contact us. That's what we do for my SAAS where we start at $599/Month (B2B) but our custom/contact us prices can go $50k/Year or even more. Some reasons are custom user count, custom features/integrations, tighter SLAs with dedicated Customer Success Manager (CSM) etc. Gotta charge for all those conveniences.

Most of the times you can get rough pricing from them before taking a call if you describe your needs / number of seats, or at most a 20min call. Just make it clear you have many vendors to assess in a first pass and the more calls the less likely you are to subscribe in your opening contact.

I'd also recommend only engaging with the top 3 better products before you go through such a big list.

TL;DR: use a SaaS procurement vendor like TropicApp.io or Vendr.

Long version: First, my heart goes out to you. I was in charge of a lot of SaaS procurement for a number of years, and even as our company grew and our ability to pay went up, the lack of pricing transparency only became more frustrating to me! It used to be: “if we have to ask, we can’t afford it,” but then it became, “we can likely afford it, but it would be nice to make sure we should even talk to this vendor or industry before sitting through long eye-rolling sales calls.” (Or even worse, the 15 minute sales call with an intern to get you as a lead before you can talk to someone who knows anything.) but my blood pressure is rising, and I digress…

To level the playing field, we recently signed up with one of the “SaaS procurement” companies that has made this MUCH more tolerable. We use TropicApp.io, and have been happy with them and how they do business. They help us find and negotiate purchases. Even before we buy something, we can ask them stuff like, “we need a tool to do X. What are people using these days, and what is ballpark pricing and pricing model for a tool like that?” They (and their competitors) charge a percentage of the money they save you. They can’t help with smaller stuff (less than 5k per year), but are helpful with the rest. (Not affiliated with them or any competitors like Vendr.com - just happy that these companies exist now, and wish we’d found them sooner.)

Just email them :)

Its easy to tell them in the email to not call you back. Plus you can instruct them to include a specific word in their reply subject line so that you can quickly filter to see who read your instructions and who didn't. It's a bit like that concert M&M check.

I tried to get SuSE to tell me how much Rancher was so I could just buy it. I was completely ready to just lay down my credit card. They refused without a sales call. And in fact, it was impossible for me to even schedule a sales call without joining their Slack channel to tell them their website's Contact Us form was broken. The call got bumped like 3 times over 2 months, they didn't schedule a new one. Now I've found out that Rancher's support sucks and SuSE is botching their communication, so I'm going with a competitor.

SaaS people: Don't make it hard for me to give you money. At the very least, give me a 30 day trial (of Enterprise features) while we go through your stupid sales dance.

It really depends heavily on the products and industries or verticals they serve. Also, it may depend on their exact GTM strategy, companies that sell primarily through a VAR type of channel are usually more hesitant to disclose pricing, as some of their partners may wrap other services or functions around the offering.

Pricing can also vary based on how turn-key the product it. An enterprise CRM, for example, can be really hard to get pricing for as you are likely going to spend more on the implementation at first than on the actual licenses. In those cases the solution is also somewhat like buying insurance, where the expectation is that you have some customized add-ons and things that are specific to your environment.

I bought several "contact us" style software. Usually their licensing is hard to calculate and you will need to buy more licenses upfront from what you think you need just in case.

Worst experience was a reporting tool for telecoms that was licensed by port. Devices used to have 4-8 ports but the year before suddenly it was feasible to ship 32-port devices to customers. This made the tool prohibitive.

My best experience was when a sales rep just called and told me the pricing range for their product: 5x our budget, without counting cost of migration. It was the most productive sales call I ever had.

I avoid companies that won't publish their prices because it signals two things:

1. If you're not going to spend time jumping OUR hoopes to talk with us, you're not that important, we don't care about you, little fish.

2. We won't quote our price because we want human-human time with you to maximize our quote based on how dumb you are. (how hard can we scam you out of money).

There might be a place in the world for a site where existing customers can anonymously report how much they've been quoted for named services at named companies. It'd be very convenient.

If they have a "personal/business" tier that has a price, just use that multiplied by the number of seats/licenses. It's ballpark close enough usually.

This isn't for B2B - I've seen this a lot in daycares and high-end cars. Generally, it's a way to signal "if you have to ask, you can't afford it"

I've had success asking other clients what they pay, assuming they're not a direct competitor of yours. This is easiest at conferences and professional events.

Some sites like Capterra or TrustRadius will occasionally have pricing data about various products.

If you go through a third party vendor or MSP, they may also be able to give you more realistic pricing data based on existing customers.

But honestly, picking up a phone and calling is good practice anyway. If you can't get an honest ballpark estimate within 5 minutes that's not a company you want to work with anyway.

Details like what you actually need are less important, but you would definitely need to enter how much your company is worth as an input, if such website existed.

If you have enough options though, you can be upfront about it - hey I have a number of services to check, either you give me ballpark given this copypasta or I'm checking the other ones.

Joel wrote about it in 2004: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...

If your company is serious about buying that much software your best bet is something like vendr. It'll cost you, but you'll get answers to your pricing questions, and if you're buying, they'll negotiate discounts for you. no need to 'talk to sales'

I think that they hide prices so that they can charge you the most that they find suitable for your use case. If you are an enterprise user off-the-shelf product is probably not what you need.

I normally find discussions on Reddit for these kinds of things. Recently have had to research Acunetix, Snowflake and some others and have found interesting (if anecdotal) info on Reddit.

I'd say if you don't want to spend a month in sales calls then don't work in procurement. There isn't really a short cut, that's what the job is.

I have pricing on my site revpilots.com for various enterprise software that is normally not listed publicly. We'll even get on calls for you to get pricing.

Check out Vendr! https://www.vendr.com/

No, the only comfort I can give you is that you also have to make deals with companies with list prices. Otherwise you end up paying too much.

G2.com has a lot of pricing for comparison. Not sure if it necessarily shares information not available on the vendor sites, though.

i liked the differentiation where Enterprise customers paid for full seats + things only a large company would want + fudge factor for slow to pay and higher cost of sales.

the hardest part is if their software required extensive integration and customization; that help would cost extra and the project would be largely it depends.

I have found https://sso.tax/ to be helpful.

Find a government contract for the services. Many things are on GSA or state contracts.

Companies do this so they can price discriminate for high margin goods and services

capiche.com has some good pricing data and reviews from knowledgeable users.

Don’t ever use a service that only offers “contact us” pricing. Done.

Some companies make you sign an NDA before they tell you their prices.

I should make a bookmarklet that changes "call for pricing" to something like:

  window.location="https://www.google.com/search?q=" + window.location.host.split(".").slice(-2,-1) + "+vs";

Contact us == Prepare for daily emails until you block our domain

"Camels and Rubber Duckies", Joel on Software

> I'd like to avoid spending the next month in sales calls.

Just exclude them from your search. They're garbage software anyway.

Capiche.com

A lot of good feedback here. One additional thought I'd provide is that I wouldn't rule someone out based on a "Contact us for price" button. I'd click the button, let them know what you need, and then let them rule themselves out based on their responses. Sometimes they may give you a price directly in their response (or at least a ballpark), sometimes they may insist on a call. Take the call, but draw the line where you're comfortable (e.g. give me a ballpark after 30 minutes or I'm out - you can be more tactful in your wording).

Think about it from the company's perspective. Let's imagine as a company, you do an experiment where you have one landing page that shows the pricing, and another landing page that says "contact us". Let's also imagine that your product is enough of an enterprise solution that no one ever buys it without talking to someone at some point during the evaluation process (even if the pricing is up front, it requires enough of an investment that the customer wants to be absolutely certain it will satisfy their needs both now and as they grow). Finally, let's imagine that you have 3 full-time sales people to handle the incoming communications at whatever step of the evaluation process.

Now, if the outcome of this experiment is that the "contact us for pricing" results in 1/5th the incoming contacts, but those then convert twice the rate, you might choose the up-front pricing (2x conversion rate but on 20% of the leads means only 40% the sales compared to up-front pricing).

However, what if the 5x incoming contacts is too many for your sales team of 3 to respond, causing the up-front pricing to result in fewer sales with more work? Then you might choose the "contact us for pricing".

But what if it's so many more incoming contacts at a consistent enough conversion rate that you can justify adding a 4th and 5th sales person to realize those sales? Then you might choose the up-front pricing.

But what if the up-front pricing pigeon-holes you into your beachhead market and makes it more difficult to expand vertically or horizontally, which could lead to a trail-off in the incoming contacts and sales? Then you might choose the "contact us for pricing".

The point is, the one that makes the most sense for a company depends on a lot of variables, most of which would be opaque to an outside observer. Being able to tell the difference between a company that has "contact us for pricing" because it made sense for them, compared to one trying to exploit price discrimination (as described by some of the more cynical takes) is next to impossible without talking with them. Even in that scenario though, if they end up giving you a better product for a better price, then being willing to reach out to them could end up being a competitive advantage for your company over another which disqualified them on that basis.