I have never understood why companies don't just publish pricing. It too often means pricing is just a game they want to play, for both personal and enterprise use, and it's a game I all too often don't want to play. If pricing is not available, I almost universally move on.
Because when you are dealing with corporates the amount of time needed can vary massively by customer. A bank or healthcare firm will come at you with endless feature requests, support requests etc. over things they claim is a regulatory requirement / they must have ASAP.
You also might offer the first bank a discount because once you have one onboard its much easier to sell your product to others. They know a competitor has already done all the due diligence and decided you're safe, so the risk they spend months evaluating you to not be able to move forward is minimal.
I concede that I mainly approach this from a non-enterprise mindset, but even trying to research these things for enterprise can be frustrating. It does seem to make sense for products that are at a large scale, both in deployment "size" or effect and pricing.
Because pricing is always negotiable in enterprise settings. Even if it was published, that wouldn’t necessarily be what would be charged.
I agree with you in a personal sense that it’s frustrating, but in enterprise, it often is too variable to list because if you are a big enough client, you’re going to get discounts and deals that regular folks just won’t. It’s no different than volume pricing in any other industry.
Enterprise software is more willing to milk money from corporate than to leave money on the table. The amount of money a company is will to pay can be order of magnitudes higher than an enterprise software imagined. Hence SaaS company hire bunch of sales people/sales engineer to "understand your need", which is an euphemistic way of asking how deep your pocket is. And when everyone is doing this, you can't simply move on, there are only so much options.
Of course, you could see it completely differently, private pricing means longer sales process, higher labour cost and fewer customer. Having tiered offering is common. This is actually what gitlab did, free plan, individual plans, business plan[1]. If you don't need worrying about data residency, you don't need contacting their sales at all.
One more angle, when you are starting up, every bucks feel like coming out of your own pocket. When purchasing "enterprise plan", your company already attain certain size and you are spending your company's money, money that otherwise would not fall under your pocket anyway.
Or your startup is forced to look into "enterprise plans" due to necessary features for compliance being locked behind them, without having attained a certain size and "enterprise" money.
I assume you don't work in the Enterprise IT space, this is absolutely 100% the norm. There is no such thing as up-front pricing, they always want you to talk to a salescritter. In some ways, this is good as the salesperson (usually) has the same level of knowledge of a system architect or engineer, or will bring one in, and you can have an open dialogue about how (or even if) their product can solve your problem. It's bad when you know exactly what you want and the salesperson's job is merely to gauge how much they think you're willing to pay and quote accordingly.
And many companies will not even talk to you except through a reseller.
Enterprise pricing san be complicated enough that there may be billions of combinations and it can require an engineer to do scoping to determine which line items should be included.
