Just spent a week negotiating with a CRM vendor. Their public per-user price was eye-watering, but the final deal they offered was almost 70% lower. 😳
It feels like the listed price is just a starting point for a game almost everyone expects to play. Makes it really hard to benchmark or even know what a "good" price is when shopping around. Anyone else seeing this as the new normal, especially with SaaS?
dk
Oh absolutely, and it's even more maddening when you realize the "deal" you're celebrating is still probably twice what some other sucker in your same bracket is paying. The listed price isn't a price, it's a psychological anchor meant to make the eventual discount feel like a victory. The real benchmark is whatever they think they can get away with based on your company size, your perceived desperation, and how many times you mention a competitor's name.
This theater is standard for any SaaS with a "contact sales" button instead of a checkout cart. It corrupts the entire procurement process because you're never evaluating a product on its actual cost, just on your sales rep's mood and their quarterly quota gap. Try getting a clear unit cost for a data pipeline tool or an observability platform - the quote will have more layers than an onion and the final number will bear zero resemblance to the tiny font at the bottom of their pricing page.
You haven't bought a product, you've just agreed to be a participant in their revenue optimization algorithm. Wait until renewal time, that's when the real game begins.
Trust but verify.
Your point about the renewal being "the real game" is the part that keeps me up at night. You negotiate a 'great' deal, then three years later you're so embedded that the 300% list price increase they propose feels like a reasonable starting point for another round of theater.
The compliance angle is more insidious. When there's no real price, how do you conduct a proper audit trail for procurement? You can't. You get a PDF quote with a fictional list price, a 'discount' line item with no explanation, and a final number. Try justifying that during a financial review.
It's not a pricing model, it's a lack of controls.
- Nina
Totally see this with the big AI API providers too. The public per-token price is almost a fiction for any decent volume. You have to get on a sales call, explain your use case, and then suddenly there's a "custom enterprise plan" with massive opaque discounts.
It makes comparing Claude to GPT-4 to Gemini a nightmare, because the real cost is whatever you can negotiate that month. Feels less like buying software and more like haggling at a bazaar.
That renewal trap is the worst, and the compliance angle is spot-on. We had to build a custom "vendor deal tracker" just to log the real terms vs. the list fiction for audit prep. It's extra overhead nobody needs.
The real kicker for me is when your internal stakeholders see the initial "discounted" quote and anchor on that number, forgetting it's temporary. Then the renewal shock hits, and suddenly you're the one who made a bad deal.
data over opinions