Ask HN: Is “contact us for pricing” a dark pattern?
Some companies have simple products with no explicit pricing. When I call them, there is no custom or bespoke aspects of the pricing and they simply quote me a price. Why didn't they just put it on their website? Wow! A lot of fast replies here without much substance. "A dark pattern is "a user interface that has been carefully crafted to trick users into doing things, such as buying overpriced insurance with their purchase or signing up for recurring bills"."[0] By this definition, no, it's not a dark pattern. It may be a pricing strategy that you don't like, but not a dark pattern. It's an invitation to start a full discussion with the vendor about what you're trying to achieve. Usually, you'll see "Contact Us" on the pricing page for enterprise services. If you're an enterprise buyer, you usually have lots of people on your team who want different things. You might have special requirements for your industry. You probably need to sign a contract for special provisions or services. Or maybe the vendor is in a new market and they're trying to learn about their customers with an MVP. How many times have you seen the recommendation here on HN to set up a landing page and add a button that says "Email me if you're interested"? Same idea. I almost only see this for very expensive non-commodity products. I think in these industries the vendors at least believe that they are more likely to make a sale if they do it person-to-person over the phone. I don't know if they're right or not, when I see that my first step is to look for other vendors. But I think that they simply believe that they are more likely to make a sale if they screen for only people interested enough to submit a request for a quote. That's not really a dark pattern, yeah. It's not a trick, they just don't want to sell stuff that way. Vici-Valco is the most confusing one to me for this, but I believe for them it's to create a barrier to keep small time orders out. Basically, I don't think that they make much money on me ordering ten compression fittings so if they make it too easy to find prices and order stuff without human intervention they'd spend proportionally more time on small clients? It's odd, I mean, they do have a catalog and the catalog has prices. It's just super hard to order online or find pricing otherwise. There's a vendor I deal with that does something like this. They have an online catalog and prices are listed, but to buy something, I have to email them and then they respond with a link to their fulfillment partner. At first I thought it was really dumb, because they're in a technology sector and deal with engineers all the time. Why not just take me to a shopping cart? But then I got an email that said something like "HeyLaughingBoy, I noticed you bought 5 units of $SENSOR in July and another 10 units in August. Would you like to discuss volume prices going forward? We can scale the price to your estimated annual volume..." I thought it was a great idea to get a dialog going with someone who looks small time (me) but could become a major customer. This way, they build a relationship with me before I just start looking for someone cheaper as my sales grow. If they just listed prices at preset volume levels, that would never happen. It's more about charging prices based on what customers are willing to pay rather than a fixed price. In B2B sales you can swing much higher prices from bigger clients for the same thing, but that's harder if they know what you charge smaller businesses. People talk. I'm in a specific industry and on a lot of industry specific mailing lists. When companies charge some of us extra, everyone quickly learns about it and that ends up making the vendor look bad and makes everyone in the industry seek alternatives. It's not that companies are charging arbitrarily different amounts. They package features and levels of service or support differently for bespoke contracts, and that makes some of them cost more. Any email list that failed to observe this would not be useful other than for the small companies looking for the feature/price floor. Within reason, I personally am not offended by small variations based on legitimate negotiating for larger volumes (or even smaller volumes). I feel like most places will give you at least a bit of a discount if you offer something in return like enough volume to make it less hassle to sell to you. Or if you just ask... I've definitely gotten 5-10% "discounts" multiple times just by asking if they can give me one. I figure this is the "wasn't price sensitive enough to ask" surcharge. But if the prices were super random feeling yeah, for sure. I haven't personally run into more than a ~5-10% variation myself usually. I think the only time I hear about it is when I get a price from a vendor, turn them down, and then have them come back with an offer for the same thing at 25% off. At that point they're kind of highlighting that their pricing is 25% higher than it needs to be for them to make a healthy profit so while I might take them up on it (once) I'm extremely likely to find a new vendor. I've definitely done that before with a company that had dramatically overpriced high speed cameras. We kept ordering from them because we didn't want to worry about changing the brand. I doubt we'll order from them again. I hate it because it is used as a tool to find out "how much we can make that sucker pay" which is adversarial approach instead of partnership. So in the end it is device to sell me overpriced service. There are pricing pages that have price x, price y and "enterprise contact us". So maybe vendor that has only "contact us" is selling only to F500 and I am not a customer for them. If a product is used in very complex environments and has a rich set of options then a conversation is needed to be able to offer a quote. If no price is quoted on the website it's probably safe to assume minimum pricing is above $10,000. I don't think this is a dark pattern. I mostly agree with you, but I think there are forms of this that I would definitely consider dark patterns - The one that immediately jumps to mind is "Add this item to your cart to see the price". There's no good intention there, just manipulation. The statistics show a user is more likely to buy an item after adding it to their cart, and this forces them to do that before revealing pertinent information to the user. --- Basically - If it's not a solution that can be customized to the user/customer, I find hiding the price is almost always a dark pattern. If it is a solution that can be customized, it may or may not be a dark pattern, but I still tend to avoid companies that do this - it often means they want additional information from me, or that they're hoping additional sales and marketing information will make me less price sensitive before showing me the final price. While the "add to cart to see price" pattern may be dark, it's worth noting that the retail seller that makes you do this is probably not the party who's responsible for the pattern. It turns out that some manufacturers make the retailer agree to not advertise a price lower than MSRP. But, though they cannot /advertise/ a price below MSRP, they can /sell/ at a price below MSRP. I guess it's generally accepted that showing you a different price after you've added the item to your cart doesn't technically count as "advertising" the lower price. https://www.consumerreports.org/online-shopping/why-do-i-hav... I know a successful business owner who uses this feature to then pay a tracking service to grab your email then spam progressive cart reminder and discounts in hopes of converting a sale. He says it’s very effective Showing a price after an item is in the cart can be a contract hack around pricing contracts with manufacturers or distributors, where you’re not able to directly advertise your “best” price. Most of the time this is referred to as a MAP agreement and companies can be real aggressive in enforcing them. I agree with this answer. While I don't like the approach, I don't think it's a dark pattern. I applaud your effort to distinguish them, though; diluting words by overloading them is a disservice to language. It all comes down to whether it's a product-led or sales-led company. Product-led companies usually have plans for all usage sizes including custom plans for large enterprises. Sales-led almost always don't want to be in business with the long-tail of the market. That sales call is their way of effectively filtering those customers out. see also: https://blog.close.com/product-led-sales-led-marketing-led/ Maybe it is really many possible product combinations presented as a comprehensive product or maybe they don't even have a product.. I'm sorry but what is a dark pattern if that doesn't qualify? By that definition it _is_ a dark pattern. The thing people are being tricked into doing is divulging contact info/interest even if they're not going to buy at the eventually revealed price. Also, the act of filling out a form may cause them to give undue weight to the product since there has been an “investment” made after submitting. So that is another way the pattern tricks you. Sometimes there's no good reason, but the common case is: It ensures you are captured as a lead and establishes a human connection. Serious buyers have no problem getting on the phone. The fixed price you were quoted is a starting point for negotiation. It's the "book price", aka the chump price. You're leaving money on the table if you're not haggling with them or finding a way to get a better deal. Enterprise culture is to negotiate price. They have purchasing teams - multiple people whose entire job is to get a better deal than whatever is listed on the website or the first number quoted over the phone. These people are hard nosed and have zero problems calling for a price. A good purchaser on a big enough deal would rather hunt down your sales team on linkedin and start talking than accept a list price on your website. As an aside: How many people would hang a sign around their neck with a fixed price when looking for non-contract employment? How many slap a fixed price on the side of their house during a sale? Fixed prices are in some ways the anomaly; haggling mostly disappears when the cost of negotiation exceeds the benefit of price discrimination and products and customers are fungible. Personally I love fixed prices but most business does not work like that. > How many slap a fixed price on the side of their house during a sale? Everyone? Every house listing I've seen has a price on it. Negotiating can happen but advertising a price is the norm. ITT: Nobody who has ever been involved in enterprise purchasing and decision making. When my employer (only ~300 people) switched to salesforce it took 3 years from when we started looking at vendors to completing the switch. Buying software at this level is not just adding it to your cart, its creating a project that will take up huge chunks of dev time. Its a discussion between parties, and the price (contract) takes months of work to agree on. We hired a consultant literally just for redlining.
https://blog.pandadoc.com/what-is-contract-redlining-and-con... Just because you can implement easily does not mean 90% of the vendor's customers can. I see a lot of answers about how it enables companies to charge more. That’s true, but it also enables companies to charge less. It’s all about price discrimination, and it’s not a bad thing. Without this you either end up with one of two scenarios. Scenario 1: companies price extremely high on paper and then negotiate down afterwards, as happens in the US health insurance markets, and it’s a nightmare. Or scenario 2 the producer ends up pricing for their profit maximizing volume, which at constant price means customers who realize greater utility are subsidized by those who realize the least utility. Consider a very real example: AWS charges outrageous markups on bandwidth. This is because many organizations realize far greater value from the AWS ecosystem and are willing to pay. This prices out people who are more price sensitive, and means they end up using a competitor, even if Amazon would happily sell them bandwidth at a lower price. They simply can’t without canibalizing their fatter customers. I’ve negotiated services for startups at a fraction of the cost of what larger companies are paying (on the order of 90% less) because of this dark pattern. I don't remember where, but once I read an article saying something like "If Space-X can have price calculator right on their side, so can your shitty SaaS solution." That's really shortsighted. A SaaS company could meet an amount of new requirements that I'm sure SpaceX can't. Sure, but they could also give me some idea of what the core product costs without my specific tweaks I wouldn't call it a dark pattern. It's more like an archaic sales tactic, but I guess it still works. It's the old "How Much Money Do You Have?" pricing scheme [1]. They're either getting income/revenue information that's connected in some way to the number you called from, or you're providing just enough information to enable them to quote a particular price for you. [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-... I skip anything that doesn't tell me the pricing terms up front. It's mostly relevant for enterprise customers, even if you have pricing for them listed they will not just sign up for your service. Enterprise deals involve many steps: demos, negotiations, contracts, trials, security reviews etc. You would want them to contact you to get this process started. Enterprises often want your solution to integrate with so many other pieces of software that you are firmly out of "list prices" territory and very much in "let's design a solution that fits all these unique needs... and also has to run on-prem, because of this or that regulation" one, instead. If your needs are served by the standard packages and you want to hook the thing up to your Slack for notifications, that's super. There is a pricing plan for that. If you need basically a full year's worth of effort to hook this service up to your environment, and you want the experts involved with doing this integration, there's a kind of pricing plan for that, too. The latter just does not look reasonable on a web page, because it starts with "it depends" and scales (non-?)linearly. Bothers me too. I think it's a weasel-y move because it forces the customer to start a convo at an information-disadvantage. Rule of thumb: Assume any SAAS company with a "Contact us for pricing" will cost at least $20k per year. If your price point is much less than this you should probably just have users self-service with a credit card. Right. I treat "contact us for pricing" as the corporate equivalent of "if you have to ask, you can't afford it". Where did you get that number? I think it really varies. One of the products I manage is a lower price point but the implementation and use cases are complex and different for each customer. It does not make sense to enable self-service implementation for our software. This practice is to enable suppliers to perform "value based pricing" i.e. adapt their price according to how much you want / need their offer. No, it is not. Go listen to the Planet Money episode about why old veterans hate the red cross. When you don't have enough information to set price well, you can do a ton of damage to your company by setting it too low. It's not always a "great strategy" but it's not a dark pattern in and of itself. When I'm looking for pricing, I'm looking for order of magnitude, and enterprise sales guys want me to invest hours of meetings just to get that because it's an investment/sunk cost to them, but as an architect, it's really just a question of "does this scale in single digit multiples of $10, $100, $1,000 $10,000, or $100,000?" and I don't want to sit through what some of us have come to call their stupid time-share presentation. But the reason they do those dumb meetings is it seems related to their performance measurement, which is ultimately by revenue, but it is a function of deals and their stage through their sales pipeline. How do you measure the quarterly performance of a sales person when the average enterprise sales cycle can be 6-18 months? Number of deals in the pipeline per stage and probability of that revenue landing. By forcing stupid meetings to get the most minor bit of information, they can move my "deal," into a pipeline stage that improves the perception of their performance numbers, independently of whether revenue is ultimately realized. If you are a startup they need those numbers for projections that go into investor and analyst presentations that get you the funding to stay alive, and it's why you don't want engineers to say something or add information that will collapse the superposition of everyone's ability to believe long enough to survive to a more stable state. My experience has been that enterprise sales are bizarre political intrigues that are divorced from features and product qualities, where concreteness itself becomes the enemy. So, tl;dr: "contact us for pricing," isn't so much a dark pattern as it is the outer edge of an infinite existential void. I'm sure there is a more optimistic explanation though. As others have said, it's an old sales tactic that benefits the seller. You'll see it mostly in places where: 1. There's not much competition for the product, so the seller has no reason to compete on price and make things easy to compare 2. The sales process / cycle for that industry requires so many stakeholders and agreements etc that pre-committing to a price range up front is just an unnecessary handicap. They'll be in negotiations with numerous executives with a prospective buyer potentially for years before getting a signature. In these situations the buyer is not a naive consumer, they're a corporation that can take care of themselves and giving out the price is a free point in that game. 3. They haven't sold anything yet. They are still in the research phase and are feeling out what people might pay. Oh yes it is. In my field, usually that means purchasing requires dealing with some fast speaking salesperson to 'hook you up' with their great deal so they can get a nice commission and you get an inflated price just within the maximum budget you've earmarked. It's straight out of the used car salesman playbook, trying to size up your mark to see how much juice you can squeeze out of them. If pricing was done logically scaled to some size, it would just be listed as such. If I see "call for price" or something like that, I spend earnest effort looking for a competitor that deals with me straight without having my contact info first. I think it's a bad marketing technique. As a developer, I'm asked to evaluate competing technologies all the time and pick one. I can see what your competitors charge. "Contact us for pricing" means you're out of the running. I know, it's a sales technique, but it's one that just cost you business. The business execs that I'd have to involve to contact you for pricing are, firstly - cheap, secondly - are probably going to outnegotiate you, thirdly - introduces a whole level of complexity to the process that I'd rather just pick your competitor and ask for approval. No, in fact you should consider it a relevant signal contributing to the UX of a site: if you're appalled by seeing this on a site, you are vrey very likely not a good fit for them and vice versa. It depends, I live in a country with a lot of regulations and inflation. I would've to change prices every week. I do it because I have a platform that allows me to, but not everyone has as much data. On the other hand, we offer a custom plan that has a contact us for pricing button. Because in that plan we are gonna do whatever we can to add as much value as possible for your business. Mostly integrations and updates on legacy systems. I once read that you can sell software to companies for under $100 or over $100,000, but not for anything in between. If a salesman is required, perhaps to customize the order, you end up on the expensive side. That side also has "contact us for pricing". The same idea applies when selling other products to companies, with slightly different dollar thresholds. It's annoying to the person who needs to get details and pricing and who would love to buy the product but right now is just trying to find out if a project is feasible. It's insulting in that they could just give me the information but they won't because they think I am too stupid to understand it "the way they intend it" (i.e., in a way that doesn't solve my problem or does so using mostly marketing buzzwords that cause endless technical implementation issues and waste so very much time). The buzzword I've learned to dislike the most is "RESTful!". It means that your API is written by developers who don't my industry at all. And no, it doesn't matter what industry. RESTful means you've started with a set of premises that don't work in the real work except under very limited circumstances (like distributing media files). It's self-destructive in that any normal people aren't interested in a sales pitch. They just want information. If you aren't going to provide that then you're at the bottom of the list and we're probably going with a competitor of yours unless you somehow find out that I need a similar product and you start calling upper management. That's the worst-case scenario... now we aren't implementing technology that fits into our use case and architecture, we're dealing with a push from senior management to use technology that doesn't work. We know that a sales call means your product sucks. Hard. At face value no, this isn't a dark pattern. But experience tells me otherwise. If your product is "contact us for a quote!" then I already know it won't work and is overpriced because you have to work so very hard to "sell" it. Could I be wrong? Yes. Have I been wrong? No. In 30 years of doing this. Wow... I guess I had a lot to say on this subject. I feel so much better now. ;-) For your situation I agree. And when I run into that, I just pass them by and go on to another vendor. There are only a few reasons where I could see 'contact us for pricing' being appropriate: 1 Volatility caused by unknown market or price war, where competitor keeps causing price stability issues. 2 Complex purchase - too many confusing options - so we have to have a sales person walk you through it. 'So you want a web page and you need a specific person to do it ...' 3 Contractual - in rare instances a vendor can purchase excess product, at a steep discount. But are not allowed to advertise the price. All other options make me think of a used car salesman trying to figure out how much they can do you for. I always assume that if I have to ask for pricing then I can't afford it. If there truly is no meaningful exchange of details before giving a price, pretty much yes. (although tbh even "who is the client" can be relevant - few people are going to put "in our experience companies in industry X are always a pain to work with and cause more support needs, and thus we'll bill higher" on the website, but if you have few high-value contracts that's a relevant concern. Not so much if you sell many small things.) I generally just assume it means “I can’t afford this”. There's no trickery, they just want contact details to get you into the sales funnel. It's a strategy, and just because there's no custom/bespoke pricing for you doesn't mean they wouldn't cut a deal for hundreds or thousands of users. That said, I'm shocked they'd do this for a simple product selling a single item. It wouldn't be worth the time spent on the phone. It's not a dark pattern but Ive already clicked away to research other products. You don't show the price because you want me to talk to a salesperson that has to justify the price. I don't want to talk to a sales person. I want a demo account if it's a service and a number for a technical person to answer questions Save the pitch for someone who gives a damn The sales person is an impediment to the sales process A startup doesn't necessarily want everyone to know its pricing. They might be happy to let potential customers know, but not competitors, family and friends, customers' clients and suppliers, the press, etc. Making people contact the company lets the startup screen inquiries. And competitors aren't likely to have the gall to ask. I have a "contact us" for the agency plan of userTrack.net as the pricing depends on what do you intend to use the product for and how many clients do you want to offer access to. I do clearly state pricing for the normal plans, otherwise that would just push away most of the customers. Not only are they trying to obscure pricing (the ideal pricing scheme for any good for the seller is to maximize what EACH customer is willing to pay), they are trying to increase your "sunken cost fallacy" switching cost by engaging in a long drawn out sales process. Can you clarify a bit more ? Are you saying you call these companies and they just give you a price for Item X without asking you any questions ? Are you saying it is a commodity product/service that has no variation at all depending on your needs ? Yes, this means the business model is based on extracting whatever they can get from you. I have no problem with the 'contact us for pricing', but I am astonished at the number of dark patterns that some big Internet e-commerce sites use. Maybe time for some regulations or monopoly-breaking? I don't know about dark pattern, but I do know that in most cases, I am so averse to negotiating that I'd rather do without the product/service than reach out to ANYONE to talk about pricing. They try force you to watch/listen/engage into sales dance with their sales people. Typical for overpriced products or middlemen-driven sales pipeline It is a transparently obnoxious pattern, unless you are buying something expensive and highly customisable. It Depends. If your target customer are large Business or Enterprise, then it is a great filter. They don't want you to see it for $10 then later see it for $40 and feel ripped off I don’t think it’s a dark pattern, but it makes me much much less likely to buy. It's to give worse prices to customers that are not good at negotiating. as a layperson I take it to mean "if you have to ask, you can't afford it". Absolutely. Try to imagine how much different the world would be if, for instance, job listings were required to post their compensation exactly. I prefer ranges. Not all candidates are same even for the same job. If I hire an A player, I may give them a bit more to sweeten the deal. If I hire a B player (who is good enough for the role but is not an A player so far), I would negotiate the compensation a little early on as long as it is something the candidate B accepts. Range gives you the floor (if they are honest). Let's say the range is 65k-85K, then its fair game to say that the best candidate may get 85K but a good enough may only get 65K or say 70K. Also as a candidate if you are looking for 100K min, you know this position is not for you. What I don't like about this is that people really aren't A players or B players in practice. It's not a video game, real life is messy. In some situations, a B player can be an A player, and vice versa. Past performance does not indicate future results, and in my experience usually the best worker is the one who has simply been given a chance and the freedom to self optimize their job for some months, and rarely are they the most qualified applicant. No one is good at their job on day one nor should they be expected to be. There are too many confounding variables involved with the very abstract concept of 'work effort,' for it to be reliably used. Instead, set a price for the role, and if someone is exceeding their anticipated productivity and putting more work on their back, give them a raise. I think if you're at the level of A or B player, then you're already at the top of the field. There's a lot more letters in the alphabet, and a lot more difference in experience that people can have. My company for example will hire F players. We'll even hire G or H players too. Those are the roles that we are actually hiring for when we open up an entry level job. However if a C player comes along, naive and fresh out of a masters program, we'll also snap them up and pay an absolutely exorbitant rate compared to the normal salary range for their position because we want them to stay for at least 5 years. In 5 years, if they improve they'll be A or B players and we'll bump them into Director level roles in the hope that they will stay due to the responsibility and freedom the role offers even though we can't pay Google-level salaries. Having a posted initial salary will just scare off a candidate who is unnaturally good versus the rest of the local market. Disclaimer: I like to think I am/was a solid C rated developer. If you are an A player, I bow to your wisdom. I have never applied to FAANG. I know I wouldn't make even the phone cut. I’ve never understood this logic, can’t you just create different roles? What if the candidate applies to the wrong one, but would be suitable for a different one. At that point it's not much different to just having a range on their in the first place. it's completely different - Google for example will down level you based on performance. if you have candidates that have the same job with wildly different salaries which just exacerbates arbitrary inequities. the range solution also creates problems when handling promotions the one who benefits the most from the "range" solution is the employer, really. > if you have candidates that have the same job with wildly different salaries How do you classify something as the same job versus a different job though? Two developers may have roughly similar responsibilities but one may be much better than the other. And it would be reasonable to pay them more in those circumstances, but it's very hard to quantify that objectively. Also, Google is a huge company so they can advertise 5 jobs at different levels and fill them all. Whereas smaller companies may want someone and not be too sure about what level they need: it may depend more on who they can get. They can't afford to be too picky. I've gotten multiple jobs in life where I was able to negotiate a much larger salary then they had intended to pay due to being of more worth to them once they interviewed me. So that would be done away with? No thanks. I'm happy that people have varying skillsets and that employers can pay more or less for a posting based on the person they choose. I think you're guilty of falling prey to the "decoy effect" here. The labor market is a carnival, and they're selling tokens to you. You can buy 25 tokens for 10 dollars or 15 tokens for 5 dollars. The latter strategy is locally optimal, and you are using that as an argument for it's global optimality. That's exactly the point of the con though. Companies DO NOT want to bid on labor, so they'll use whatever trick they can to avoid having to do it. >Companies DO NOT want to bid on labor, so they'll use whatever trick they can to avoid having to do it. Workers also do not want to work cheaper than they can get, and last I checked, there's over 5 million companies in the US, and plenty of evidence that those companies are competing for labor. So they do bid on labor. If a company does not match it's competitors, employees move. And a company has every incentive to pay more than competitors, up to the break even point, since it gets them better employees. Even if a few companies collude, it open the door for a competitor to break ranks and steal employees. This breaking of ranks is prevalent in all sorts of cartels around the world - it's nearly impossible to make companies stick to an agreement when by breaking it they can gain advantage over rivals. The carnival metaphor makes little sense. Employees and employers are in a market trading goods, nothing more, nothing less. No, he's not. That's what gets lost in the shuffle in discussions like this. He is saying it works for him and like it or not, that's what the vast majority of people care about. What's In It For Me? No, that's a mischaracterization of my argument. The decoy here is the lower salary that was the supposedly "market rate" salary for the work he does. That price wasn't advertised publicly in a central market for job listings, so it's an unrelated third option that is dominated by his current strategy that drives him to believe that his current strategy is globally optimal, despite tremendous evidence to the contrary. He would make more money if he could sort job listings by offered salary. You shouldn't call them and find something else. It's a money grab. Yes it is a money grab, but there are industries where every player does this, so you have no choice but to play their game if you want in.