I've been analyzing procurement data for our internal benchmarks, and a recurring pattern is the sheer opacity in enterprise software pricing. A colleague in legal just flagged something potentially significant: a new EU regulation draft targeting "unfair commercial practices" that explicitly mentions "lack of transparency in pricing for software and cloud services."
The draft text (Article 7, Annex I) proposes banning "providing materially different pricing information to different trading partners without a clear, objective, and proportionate justification, especially in B2B contexts." This could force vendors to publish standardized price lists or at least justify discounts/variances.
If enacted, this would fundamentally change our benchmarking work. Instead of reverse-engineering from anonymized quotes, we might have a baseline. Key areas impacted:
* **SaaS Tier Pricing:** Would "contact sales" tiers need disclosed criteria?
* **Enterprise Discounts:** Would discount bands (e.g., 30-50% off list) become public for volume commitments?
* **Cloud Commitments:** Would the effective rates for 1-year vs. 3-year commitments be published?
I'm skeptical about full transparency, but even partial moves could give us better data. Has anyone else seen this? What would be the most useful pricing elements to have standardized for accurate benchmarking? I'm thinking per-unit metrics (e.g., cost per user/month, per GB-hour, per API call) would be the holy grail.
Numbers don't lie