Pricing opacity as a market signal
When a software category prices entirely behind a sales call, the pricing strategy is the product strategy. Here's what 'contact sales' tells you about RFP software in 2025.
I have a rule of thumb I use when I look at a software category for the first time. If every vendor on the comparison page says “contact sales for pricing,” I assume the product UX matches the pricing UX. The category is opaque. The buyer experience is opaque. The product is probably opaque too.
This is an opinion piece. Here is the opinion: in proposal software, that rule of thumb has been right every time.
What “contact sales” actually means
It means three things, in roughly this order.
It means the price varies by buyer in ways the vendor can’t or won’t justify in writing. Two companies with the same number of seats and the same usage will pay different amounts because one of them was a better negotiator on a Tuesday. The variation isn’t a feature of value-based pricing; it’s a feature of the vendor’s information advantage at the negotiation table.
It means the floor is high enough that publishing it would scare off too much top-of-funnel. Loopio’s floor, by everything I have seen on review sites and in customer conversations, sits around 20K a year for the smallest serious deployment. Our comparison page cites this. It’s not a number a 12-person agency wants to see on a pricing page. So the page doesn’t have a number.
It means the sales motion is the product. The customer’s first hour with the vendor is a discovery call, not a trial. The customer’s first month is a pilot, not a deployment. The company runs on Account Executives and Solutions Engineers and Customer Success Managers, and every one of those headcount lines is in the price you eventually pay.
None of those three things is, by itself, a sin. Software with real implementation cost can reasonably price by company size. Software with deep integration work can reasonably gate on a sales call. The signal isn’t “contact sales is bad.” The signal is what shows up alongside it.
What shows up alongside it
In the proposal-software category, four things show up alongside it with depressing regularity.
Stale UI. Upland Qvidian’s G2 reviews describe the interface as something whose UI “could be more modern” — the polite phrasing of a tool that looks like it was built in 2014 and patched ever since. This isn’t a one-off review. The pattern repeats across the page.
Slow performance. Capterra reviews of QorusDocs describe the product as “very slow” — long waits to preview files, view the cart, and move through routine actions. A 10-pursuit dashboard cap that pre-dates dashboard tooling that is now table stakes on a free Trello board. The reviews aren’t complaining about performance under load; they are complaining about performance on a single-user session.
AI features that practitioners openly distrust. Loopio’s “Magic” feature gets quoted in reviews as “the answers are usually wrong.” Responsive’s search is described as “terrible” — keyword-matching in a category where semantic retrieval has been the industry default for two years. AI bolted onto a 10-year-old retrieval engine doesn’t suddenly become grounded.
Implementation timelines measured in months. A category where a 200-person company budgets six months to deploy a tool whose primary job is to draft answers from a knowledge base. The implementation isn’t six months because the product is hard. It’s six months because the data import is manual, the search has to be tuned by a CSM, and the customer’s content library has to be re-shaped to match the vendor’s schema.
These four things don’t always travel together. But in the proposal category, they travel together more often than not. And the marker that they travel together is the absence of a price on the website.
The counter-argument, fairly stated
I want to take the counter-argument seriously, because I have heard it from people I respect.
The counter goes: enterprise software has always been priced by sales call. It’s how the category works. Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow — none of them publish pricing. The fact that proposal software follows the same pattern doesn’t mean anything specifically negative about proposal software. It just means proposal software is enterprise software.
That argument has a specific problem. The vendors I named — Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow — operate at a price point and a complexity that makes a sales-led motion economically rational. Their products are also, by the standards of their categories, modern. Salesforce’s UI in 2025 is not stuck in 2014. ServiceNow has shipped meaningful AI features in the last 18 months that practitioners don’t openly disparage on G2.
The pattern in proposal software is not “high-touch sales motion alongside a continuously-modernizing product.” It’s “high-touch sales motion alongside a product whose review sentiment has been deteriorating year over year.” Those are different patterns. Pricing opacity in the first case is a reasonable consequence of complexity. Pricing opacity in the second case is something else.
What is it? My read: it is the symptom of vendors who have stopped competing on product and started competing on which sales team can hold a renewal conversation longer than the customer’s procurement team can hold out. Customers churn in 18 months and re-shop the category. The next vendor’s sales team is just as good at the renewal conversation. The cycle doesn’t reward shipping new product features; it rewards shipping new comp plans.
What we publish
PursuitAgent publishes pricing on the marketing site. Not because we think every category should — Workday probably shouldn’t — but because in our category, publishing pricing is the easiest way to break the pattern.
We publish a starting tier. We publish what’s in it. We publish what isn’t. We publish the limits — KB block count, retrieval calls, seat caps. A team can, today, look at the pricing page, decide whether the floor is plausible for their budget, and start a trial without writing an email to a sales address.
The trade-off is real. We sometimes lose deals to a competitor who quoted lower because their floor is negotiable and ours is fixed. The competitor wins on the call. We don’t think this is a problem long-term. The deals we lose to negotiation are the deals where the customer was shopping on price; the deals we win are the deals where the customer was shopping on whether the product actually works.
The honest limit
I have been on the founder side of one company. I am writing about a category I have studied for a year. There is a version of this post that is wrong because the category dynamics shift in 18 months, AI feature parity arrives, and the incumbents reverse the deteriorating-review trend. I would be glad if that happened. The proposal-software category deserves better than what it has now, and the customer deserves a real choice.
What I am betting on is that the deterioration is structural, not cyclical. Stale UIs don’t become modern UIs without a rewrite. Search built on keyword matching doesn’t become semantic search without a rebuild. AI features bolted onto either of those don’t become grounded without a top-to-bottom redesign of the retrieval and generation path. The vendors with the most to gain from that rebuild are the ones with the most to lose if the rebuild fails. So they don’t do it.
That’s the gap. Pricing opacity is the visible signal. The rebuild that the incumbents won’t do is what we’re doing.