> Strongly agree with you although what "common" means here is tricky.

Ha, true! I've never seen it done, but someone should really A/B test adding a "Expensing this product for work? Reach out for a custom payment plan that fits your needs!" message if their product is popular with a business crowd.

> is the supplier working out how much they can get and so requires the sort of sales management skills which many tech startups don't have.

So this is sometimes the case, but not always.

Is the standard plan enough for you, but you require us to invoice your AP department for payment? Or you a second login for IT with access to the login/audit logs, but otherwise don't need any "enterprise" features?

You can likely get it close to the listed rate, with a minor premium for the additional effort.

Will you be a high volume user, but capable of being self-sufficient with the self-service tooling? You can get tiered pricing based off of usage, no account manager, and a fixed rate for engineering time if you need any custom support.

Will you be a massive pain - requiring an in-depth security audit, require us to agree to potentially costly-to-comply-with contractual clauses, need an account person to do every little thing for you (plus constantly (re)train your staff/agency's staff), require a generous amount of engineering time baked into the contract, and split out the agreement between a base MSA and incremental SOWs for each actual usage internally? Your pricing is no longer based on the actual product itself, but on the uncertain but potentially massive amount of labor that's going to be required to support your account.

So "Talk to us" is as much the supplier trying to figure out specifically what sort of customer you are and what your needs are (and how much you'll ultimately going to cost them), as it is working out the pricing to go with that. Which is why you don't generally see an actual listed rate with several zeros added, because that is honestly only one of the potential outcomes and "Talk to us" leaves open capturing the other outcomes as well.

I've also had success using the "Talk to us" to get lower than list rates. Sometimes because my needs are such a tiny fraction of the intended usage of the plan with a list rate. Sometimes because I work for a company that does $10bn a year in revenue, and the company is hopeful that my usage of the tool will potentially domino into other users internally seeking it out. You're right in that many tech startups don't have a high level of sales management skills from the get go, but only the very last example above really requires true sales effort. The rest are just very low pressure sales needs that require minimal if any incremental effort to support, but just happen to not fit cleanly in the pre-defined plan templates you have listed.