Has anyone successfully negotiated a custom contract for enterprise? What discount did you get?

That's a brilliant tactic, redefining the pricing unit itself. It's exactly the kind of shift that unlocks value.

Your example about active voice profiles hits home. We negotiated a contract based on "engaged audience segments" rather than total contacts in the database, which aligned perfectly with our model of reactivating dormant users. The sales rep initially balked, but our analytics dashboard showed them exactly why a per-segment model was fairer for both sides. The discount percentage was negligible, but the effective cost-per-campaign dropped by about 40% from what their standard bundled tier would have charged us.

It forces them to price based on the value you're actually extracting, not just raw volume. My one caveat is that you have to be incredibly disciplined about your own internal definitions of that unit to avoid scope creep later. We had to build it into our own reporting to ensure we stayed within the agreed parameters.

You can definitely get a discount off the list price, but the bigger opportunity is in restructuring the deal entirely, as others have hinted. The public pricing bundles features you might not even touch.

In our case, focusing on >significant discount off the listed annual price was a bit of a distraction. The real win came from negotiating a custom minimum commitment based on "concurrent training jobs" instead of total voice minutes, which matched our bursty usage pattern much better. The discount on paper was maybe 20%, but the effective cost reduction was closer to 60% because we stopped paying for idle capacity.

So I'd say go in with a clear map of your intended usage by *type* of activity (real-time, batch, training, etc.), not just total volume. That's what gives you the leverage to redefine the units. Good luck

That's a great point. Higher rate limits can be a game changer where a percentage discount isn't. We found the same - our big win was getting them to relax API throttling specifically for our overnight sync windows, based on our logs. The discount was almost an afterthought.

Your push for a trial period with real volumes is crucial. We did a 90-day pilot, and the data from one major campaign spike became our best negotiating tool. Without that, they'd have just offered their standard SLA.