Ask HN: SaaS pricing pages with high prices and not “contact sales”
Are there examples of SaaS services and pricing pages that simply show their high prices up front? I'm talking about $500+/month minimum and isn't a "pay for as much as you use" pricing chart such as AWS or GCP.
The only one that comes to mind for me is HubSpot [0]. But I'm sure there are many more.
[0] https://www.hubspot.com/pricing/marketing/enterprise?hubs_content=www.hubspot.com%2F&hubs_content-cta=hsg-nav__link-active&products=marketing-hub-professional_1&term=annual
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2023 where @undyingtrillion convened hundreds of developers and bootstrappers to share real experiences, hard numbers, and tactics.
Hundreds of active indie hackers contributed case studies, pricing heuristics, and pitfalls to avoid when moonlighting on side projects.
We provide a GPU visual graph AI platform that gets used by folks looking at relationships & correlations in their data (think cyber, fraud, social, supply chain, genomics), and came to this: https://www.graphistry.com/get-started
Many folks are individuals, or highly technical and do not want to engage, so they want to just try for themselves. Imagine a Splunk or Databricks analyst who likes to do notebooks on the side. On the other end, we'll have architects planning say a $1M or $20M data project for the next few years of their dept's data arch, and want to really think through scaling.
So we split between free/cheap self-serve SaaS, where people can just go without thinking about any infra etc, to the more enterprise self-hosting tier where they can run in their own cloud, and decide whether they like to do on their own (ex: very clear & immediate task), and when they want to talk about GPUs, graphs, AI, LLMs, etc., and how that can accelerate or solve some of the harder problems they're ultimately tackling, they have a way to reach out and we can share our experiences from similar orgs.
For louie.ai, we're basically preparing to do the same. It's possible to optimize on this stuff for enterprise teams, but we don't see much of a need: when we're solving a real enterprise problem, and are speaking our users language via our public talks, blogposts, etc, they'll check the page to make sure the form factor can make sense and it's indeed in their problem area, and then they want to talk. When something is a top 3 priority for a dept, they'll be getting on zoom calls with multiple vendors, so just need to make it easy for them to do that.
I run https://serverthiefbait.com/ and the highest plan is $900 (not recurring). However, nearly everyone who buys that plan seems to mail me with special requests, which I usually do for free but probably should switch to a 'contact sales' model and decide the price based on the customers needs.
It's usually things like "can you help us with automation to roll this out to every one of our users home directories", or "we want every wallet tagged with the computer name and path so we can respond quicker if theft is detected". Legit requests, but not features built into the built-in-a-weekend service.
Atlassian Marketplace does this for all their 3rd-party apps, e.g. https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1229877/ilograph-interactive-diagrams-for-confluence?tab=pricing&hosting=cloud
You can put in any number from 1 to 50,000 users and get an exact quote. This is possible because there's zero additional setup for an app already in an ecosystem like this. Compare that to onboarding an enterprise to a SaaS solution, or an on-prem solution, which could be a significant amount of work depending on many factors.
I work for FusionAuth. You can buy our Enterprise plan online with a credit card: https://fusionauth.io/pricing?step=plan&hosting=ha-cloud
With one hosting environment, that comes to $3800/month (or more if you are in certain locales).
It's been done, but not often. More often folks at that price point want to talk to sales people to understand the product or perhaps do a POC.
People seem to appreciate the ability to shop prices, though.
Both Dune [0] and Nansen [1] in the cryptocurrency data analytics space have high monthly price points. Note that Nansen still has a "Contact Sales" button with a $2k / month price — I imagine this follows the "always allow someone to pay you more" advice I've seen across HN over the years.
[0] - https://dune.com/pricing [1] - https://www.nansen.ai/plans