JimDabell3 days ago
Also see Paywall Screens: 10k screenshots of paywalls in mobile apps.
Yes. Welcome to the world of committed contracts, call-us pricing, and “partnerships. At many-zeroes scale every cent is negotiated to the point that you’ll get different pricing based on the hour of the day that you make the API call.
Want a single product? It's only available for annual subscriptions for hundreds of dollars, with huge cancellation fees (the rest of the year). But it comes with a dozen or so products you'll never download lol
Before the LLM boom, I wouldn't have thought twice about having fine-grained options, but since then, every SaaS company on the face of the planet has forcibly bundled ChatGPT and its ilk and jacked up prices — LLM crap I don't use and don't plan to use in its current state.
Similarly, many might wanna go initially with a simple option but later, based on their usage, whittle it down to the few that are relevant, save money in the process, and commit to the company.
* Tiers (aka new car model): something is always strategically left out of the otherwise "ideal" tier to force you up a level, even though you won't use most of the other options. Sometimes the "nearly there" tier is artificially expensive to drive you to the higher tier - the same trick as a medium coffee being only fractionally cheaper than the large. Sometimes there's a ratchet where you can upgrade but a downgrade is a huge hassle and/or penalised.
* A la carte (aka the car/dishwasher spares model): every option feels expensive and you feel like you're being nickel-and-dimed and you know the marginal cost of providing that option was small
* Top-up (aka the phone minutes model): top ups are obscenely expensive and are either a punishment for being "cheap" (i.e. prudent) or act as a threat to push you up a tier in the first place
Add a few special offers, points, cost sinks and lock-ins (especially where hardware is involved), rewards and all that crap here and there to muddy it up to prevent a clear comparison being made. I basically assume all subscriptions are doing some kind of mind-games or scam with every little aspect of the pricing.
Not that a fair price can't be any of the above options. The vendor has to cover the overheads somewhere!
<font size=small>call us</font>
<h3>let's talk!</h3>
or my other pet peeve https://lucidic.ai/#:~:text=Get%20started%20for%20free aka don't worry about it until you like it!
If they have to, because they don't know how to use what they buy, that's one thing. But don't force a call to, let's say, sign in with OIDC or turn on audit logs.
Companies that seek to convert every single potential sale and feel a non-sale is a net loss tend to be the companies that I as a potential customer do not want to be a customer of. They tend to have shite customer support anyways.
At the end of the day, the "contact us" pricing clearly is not something that ends companies, otherwise nobody would use it.
> ["Call for pricing"] also means that the price isn't fixed, and that a good negotiator might be able to get a lower price than someone else.
But you also say:
> [A potential customer who doesn't want to talk to sales] could be a customer you wouldn't want anyways. Customers looking solely for lowest price tend to be nightmare customers...
So the potential customer who does call for pricing -- possibly with the intent to negotiate that price down -- is also potentially that nightmare customer who is just looking for the lowest price and will be a drag on your time and resources.
To me, the potential customer who just wants to get started without needing to suffer through a call with a sales person... well, that customer sounds at least as likely to be someone who will be a nice, quiet customer who uses your product and doesn't call or write in with inane complaints and issues all the time.
I don't think this is a good signal. I do agree that a potential customer who calls is probably more likely to sign up, but it's still an extra barrier to customer acquisition, no matter how you slice it.
The places that are using 'call for quote' on things available on Walmart tend to be people that don't want people of Walmart listed as a customer. However, again, in my experience, I haven't seen one of these. It's been for things that are going to have sticker shock level pricing.
This is, of course, one of the many reasons why I don't run a large, VC-scale business. I don't have the patience or desire to play these sorts of games.
A good negotiator is worried about more than price. There is quality, time to get the product, support. An lot of other things on those lines that I can't think of at the moment too. A good negotiator knows what is important to them and how to make the best trade off for their situation. Sometimes a good negotiator will offer more than the asking price because they know those others are important and if the company goes out of business they get none of them (this is rare, but it is sometimes needed).
Here's 2009: https://web.archive.org/web/20090307125843/http://www.basecamphq.com/signup
if you go back to 2007 you can see the same structure in a plainer presentation; it's easy to see how they went from one to the other: https://web.archive.org/web/20070831191822/http://www.basecamphq.com/signup
Pretty interesting!
https://opengraphexamples.com/
Collection of open graph image examples.
I'd also love to be able to filter out a style, to drill down to the examples that aren't just the multi-tier ("free/basic/pro/enterprise") vertical cards (which doesn't seem to have a dedicated style tag—maybe "Stacked Cards"? but there's a lot that look like that that don't have that tag).
https://www.s3stat.com/Pricing.aspx
I’m still waiting for the next generation of trendy SaaS companies to crib it.
Love it.
Simplicity is tough, and it's hard to understand which option would be more affordable without a pricing 'calculator'.
Here's our current pricing page (for the on-prem) version
Feedback welcome!
https://investorportalpro.com/pricing.html