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> “I'm willing to pay more”

How much more? That’s the question that “talk to us” enterprise pricing is trying to answer.




I'm sure that's the correct answer, and that their very best was invested in analyzing the max profit strategy (as they should).

What I'm wondering if it means that the minimal price they can offer the service with at profit, is likely to be too steep for anyone like me, who interpret "talk to us" as the online equivalent of showing him the door. The other explanation I see is that there's not many in the camp of users who react to "talk to us" button by closing the tab instead of a deal, but I find that implausible.


> I'm wondering if it means that the minimal price they can offer the service with at profit, is likely to be too steep for anyone like me

I think the answer to that is "no". The problem is that they don't want to reveal the minimal price to their initial round of customers.

There are two basic ways you can think about pricing: cost-plus and value-minus. We programmers tend to like the former because it's clear, rational, and simple. But if you've got something of unknown value and want to maximize income, the latter can be much more appealing.

The "talk to sales" approach means they're going to enter into a process where they find the people who can get the most out of the service. They're going to try to figure out the total value added by the service. And they'll negotiate down from there. (Or possibly up; somebody once said the goal of Oracle was to take all your money for their server software, and then another $50k/year for support.)

Eventually, once they've figured out the value landscape, they'll probably come back for users like you, creating a commoditized product offering that's limited in ways that you don't care about but high-dollar customers can't live without. That will be closer to cost-plus. For example, note Github's pricing, which varies by more than 10x depending on what they think they can squeeze you for: https://github.com/pricing


This is really well put!




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