Came here to suggest groups.io as a mailing list. I use it for my HOA--we need timely notifications (trash pickup delays, parking bans, etc.) and a lot of folks don't have (or want) Facebook. It has solid moderation tools, apps if you want them (you don't need them), and some useful bonus features (calendars, polls, wikis, docs, etc.) if you find yourself needing them.
We moved to groups.io years ago when yahoo groups folded. It's very feature-rich and completely free. I have been expecting some sort of monetization attempt but so far nothing.
I have no idea how it makes money, which is sadly worrying these days...
We sell a devtool (FusionAuth, an authentication server).
We have clearish pricing on our website (the options are a bit confusing because you can self-host or pay for hosting), but we do have our enterprise pricing available for someone, and you can buy it with a credit card.
In my four years there, we've had exactly one purchase of enterprise via the website. But every enterprise deal that I'm aware of has researched pricing, including using our pricing calculator. Then they want to talk to understand their particular use case, nuances of implementation and/or possible discounts.
Maybe FusionAuth and its ilk are a different level of implementation difficulty than keygen? Maybe our docs aren't as good as they should be (the answer to this is yes, we can definitely improve them)? Maybe keygen will shift as they grow? (I noticed there was mention towards the bottom of the article about a short discovery call.)
All that to say:
* email/async communication is great
* meet your customers where they are
* docs are great and clear messaging pays off
* devtools at a certain price point ($50/month vs $3k/month) deserve different go to market motions
When we are doing vendor research, we often dequeue or deprioritize vendors that do not have any kind of pricing available for the tier we require. Generally speaking, we assume things like volume discounts are available. Also, it's good to get a rough idea of what the delta between "Pro" and "Enterprise" happens to be. Not infrequently the reason that delta isn't available is because it's stupid orders of magnitude different.
If we know that up front, we know not to waste our time tire kicking with a demo account.
So, the middle ground you describes would seem, to me, to be the right place to be. Giving your pricing page a cursory glance, I would rank it pretty highly for the kind of "initial investigation" we might do.
I think from an entrepreneur standpoint, if I see a space with vendors with non-transparent pricing, I often think "there's an opportunity there".
> I think from an entrepreneur standpoint, if I see a space with vendors with non-transparent pricing, I often think "there's an opportunity there".
That makes a ton of sense. IMO, it means one of two things:
* prices are so high because of the cost of goods sold or margins that they'll scare off anyone researching and therefore there might be an 80% solution that can be priced transparently and eat the market
* the company is still exploring pricing and doesn't have a firm grasp on COGS; this means there is some kind of blue ocean opportunity
Still no good.