Ask HN: Is “contact us for pricing” a dark pattern?

It's annoying to the person who needs to get details and pricing and who would love to buy the product but right now is just trying to find out if a project is feasible.

It's insulting in that they could just give me the information but they won't because they think I am too stupid to understand it "the way they intend it" (i.e., in a way that doesn't solve my problem or does so using mostly marketing buzzwords that cause endless technical implementation issues and waste so very much time).

The buzzword I've learned to dislike the most is "RESTful!". It means that your API is written by developers who don't my industry at all. And no, it doesn't matter what industry. RESTful means you've started with a set of premises that don't work in the real work except under very limited circumstances (like distributing media files).

It's self-destructive in that any normal people aren't interested in a sales pitch. They just want information. If you aren't going to provide that then you're at the bottom of the list and we're probably going with a competitor of yours unless you somehow find out that I need a similar product and you start calling upper management. That's the worst-case scenario... now we aren't implementing technology that fits into our use case and architecture, we're dealing with a push from senior management to use technology that doesn't work. We know that a sales call means your product sucks. Hard.

At face value no, this isn't a dark pattern. But experience tells me otherwise. If your product is "contact us for a quote!" then I already know it won't work and is overpriced because you have to work so very hard to "sell" it. Could I be wrong? Yes. Have I been wrong? No. In 30 years of doing this.

Wow... I guess I had a lot to say on this subject. I feel so much better now. ;-)

When I'm looking for pricing, I'm looking for order of magnitude, and enterprise sales guys want me to invest hours of meetings just to get that because it's an investment/sunk cost to them, but as an architect, it's really just a question of "does this scale in single digit multiples of $10, $100, $1,000 $10,000, or $100,000?" and I don't want to sit through what some of us have come to call their stupid time-share presentation.

But the reason they do those dumb meetings is it seems related to their performance measurement, which is ultimately by revenue, but it is a function of deals and their stage through their sales pipeline. How do you measure the quarterly performance of a sales person when the average enterprise sales cycle can be 6-18 months? Number of deals in the pipeline per stage and probability of that revenue landing.

By forcing stupid meetings to get the most minor bit of information, they can move my "deal," into a pipeline stage that improves the perception of their performance numbers, independently of whether revenue is ultimately realized. If you are a startup they need those numbers for projections that go into investor and analyst presentations that get you the funding to stay alive, and it's why you don't want engineers to say something or add information that will collapse the superposition of everyone's ability to believe long enough to survive to a more stable state.

My experience has been that enterprise sales are bizarre political intrigues that are divorced from features and product qualities, where concreteness itself becomes the enemy. So, tl;dr: "contact us for pricing," isn't so much a dark pattern as it is the outer edge of an infinite existential void.

I'm sure there is a more optimistic explanation though.

Sometimes there's no good reason, but the common case is:

It ensures you are captured as a lead and establishes a human connection. Serious buyers have no problem getting on the phone.

The fixed price you were quoted is a starting point for negotiation. It's the "book price", aka the chump price. You're leaving money on the table if you're not haggling with them or finding a way to get a better deal.

Enterprise culture is to negotiate price. They have purchasing teams - multiple people whose entire job is to get a better deal than whatever is listed on the website or the first number quoted over the phone.

These people are hard nosed and have zero problems calling for a price. A good purchaser on a big enough deal would rather hunt down your sales team on linkedin and start talking than accept a list price on your website.

As an aside:

How many people would hang a sign around their neck with a fixed price when looking for non-contract employment?

How many slap a fixed price on the side of their house during a sale?

Fixed prices are in some ways the anomaly; haggling mostly disappears when the cost of negotiation exceeds the benefit of price discrimination and products and customers are fungible.

Personally I love fixed prices but most business does not work like that.

Wow! A lot of fast replies here without much substance.

"A dark pattern is "a user interface that has been carefully crafted to trick users into doing things, such as buying overpriced insurance with their purchase or signing up for recurring bills"."[0]

By this definition, no, it's not a dark pattern. It may be a pricing strategy that you don't like, but not a dark pattern. It's an invitation to start a full discussion with the vendor about what you're trying to achieve.

Usually, you'll see "Contact Us" on the pricing page for enterprise services. If you're an enterprise buyer, you usually have lots of people on your team who want different things. You might have special requirements for your industry. You probably need to sign a contract for special provisions or services.

Or maybe the vendor is in a new market and they're trying to learn about their customers with an MVP. How many times have you seen the recommendation here on HN to set up a landing page and add a button that says "Email me if you're interested"? Same idea.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pattern

I see a lot of answers about how it enables companies to charge more. That’s true, but it also enables companies to charge less. It’s all about price discrimination, and it’s not a bad thing.

Without this you either end up with one of two scenarios. Scenario 1: companies price extremely high on paper and then negotiate down afterwards, as happens in the US health insurance markets, and it’s a nightmare. Or scenario 2 the producer ends up pricing for their profit maximizing volume, which at constant price means customers who realize greater utility are subsidized by those who realize the least utility.

Consider a very real example: AWS charges outrageous markups on bandwidth. This is because many organizations realize far greater value from the AWS ecosystem and are willing to pay. This prices out people who are more price sensitive, and means they end up using a competitor, even if Amazon would happily sell them bandwidth at a lower price. They simply can’t without canibalizing their fatter customers.

I’ve negotiated services for startups at a fraction of the cost of what larger companies are paying (on the order of 90% less) because of this dark pattern.