Q: Dear SaaStr: Should I Publish My Pricing?

If you aren’t sure — then yes.

Transparent pricing has many advantages:

  • It makes the sales process simpler. It allows prospects and leads to do more discovery work on their own. And it places your app in pricing context with other apps.
  • It makes the sales process faster.  They already know what it costs, and if it fits their budget.
  • It simplifies qualification — at least some of it.  Do pricing right, and a number of customers who aren’t a great fit qualify themselves out.

But … transparent pricing almost always leaves money on the table, especially in bigger deals.  And in the enterprise, sometimes it can even confuse things if a simple pricing table doesn’t really encompass a rich solution.  Vendors that sell all seven and eight figures deals like Veeva and Palantir don’t have pricing pages. 😉

So as you scale, as you grow, and as you add a more upmarket sales team, you may go less transparent. At the potential cost of some friction in the sales process, especially for smaller and mid-market deals. (Big customers will always expect to negotiate pricing, so adding transparency there in the end provides fairly few benefits).

So 9.5 times out of 10, at least start with transparent, published pricing.  Start there at first. It takes one less piece of friction out of your sales process. In the early days, the last thing you need is more friction.

A bit more here: The Confounding Logic of Discounting – SaaStr

And more data here:

Pretty Much Every App With an Enterprise Edition Uses “Contact Me” Pricing

(note: an updated SaaStr Classic answer)

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