Let's put that another way: if you have enough salesmen to operate smoothly given a high-touch sales process... your product must, on average, be very expensive.
You guys are ruthless! Please see my earlier comment about different types of customers vs. pricing models. If you are a lean startup, variable pricing can work to your advantage. But it's certainly different than buying from commodity vendors who compete only on price.
I don't think people think that it's objectively too expensive, considering the time it saves for developers.
But without any pricing guidelines published on http://www.viva64.com/en/order/, it could be anywhere between $1k to $100k, and people assume without even asking that they cannot afford it.
Is it more expensive than the potential downside if you run into one of these bugs? Sure, living dangerously allows you to avoid paying any up-front costs (e.g., the price of this tool), but on the other hand, without a tool like this it's hard to even tell what the probability of failure is or how much it'll cost you if something does fail.
Viva64 is not cheap, but it looks like an extremely solid tool; I'd imagine that for anyone with a reasonably large C/C++ codebase, it'd quickly pay for itself by offsetting time developers would otherwise spend troubleshooting, tracking down, and fixing bugs.