Why we priced in public on day one
Public pricing in enterprise RFP software is a posture signal, not a conversion tactic. A founder's note on why we put numbers on the site before we had a sales team.
Our pricing page has had numbers on it since the day the marketing site shipped. Per-seat dollar amounts, the floor for the smallest plan, the ceiling for the largest, the line where annual commitments kick in. We put them there before we had a sales team. We did not run a “talk to us” page first, then add prices later when we got tired of the discovery calls.
The decision is unusual for the category. The two largest incumbents in proposal software price by quote. So do most challengers. So did we, internally, for about a week — and then we decided not to.
A few reasons it shipped that way.
Public pricing is a posture signal
The first conversation a buyer has with a vendor — even before any sales motion — is a posture conversation. Public pricing tells the buyer something specific. It says: we know what this is worth, we are not going to negotiate that on a per-buyer basis, and you can compare us to alternatives without filling in a form. Quote-only pricing tells the buyer something else: we will charge what we think we can extract from you, the negotiation starts when you call us, and your seat-cost is a function of how good your procurement office is.
Most of the legacy RFP category sits in the second posture. The downstream consequences — buyers who feel they “won” the negotiation paying half what neighboring companies pay for the same product, sales cycles that take six months because the price isn’t anchored anywhere, churn that correlates with whoever did the original deal — are the costs the vendor pays for the optionality. We didn’t want the optionality.
It removes the worst step in the buyer journey
Buyers who land on a pricing page and find a “talk to sales” form do not all bounce. Some of them fill in the form, get the discovery call, and proceed. The ones who do that are usually the ones who already know what they want. The ones who don’t fill in the form — but who would have, eventually, if they could have seen the number first — are the ones we wanted to reach. They are buyers earlier in their evaluation, comparing options, trying to figure out whether we are remotely affordable for them before they spend the political capital of putting our name in a vendor evaluation.
Public pricing lets that buyer self-qualify. They land, they read, they see a per-seat number that is or isn’t in the band their procurement function works in, and they make a decision without our intervention. Sometimes the decision is “no, we are too small for this.” That is fine. That is information for both of us, surfaced cheaply.
It’s harder to commit to than it sounds
The hard part of public pricing is not picking a number. The hard part is committing in advance not to discount it on a deal-by-deal basis. A vendor that publishes pricing and then privately offers 30% off to anyone who asks has the worst of both worlds — the public number constrains the buyers who don’t know to ask, and the private discount erodes the trust signal the public price was meant to send.
Our internal rule: published prices are real prices. Volume tiers are public. Annual versus monthly is public. Multi-year discounts are public. Anything that’s not on the page is not a thing we do. If we ever change a price, we’ll update the page first and tell customers second, not the other way around.
That rule is harder to keep than to write. The first time a high-ACV deal asks for a custom term you don’t offer, the temptation is real. We’ve held the line so far. We expect to keep holding it. If the rule erodes, we’ll write a post saying so, because the version of public pricing that quietly turns into per-deal pricing is worse than honest quote-only.
What we expected and what surprised us
Expected: shorter sales cycles for the buyers who were going to buy anyway, because the price wasn’t a discovery question.
Expected: some bouncing from buyers for whom the floor is just too high.
Surprised us: the number of buyers who showed up because we priced in public. Public pricing turns out to be a meaningful inbound signal in a category where it’s rare. Procurement officers who hate quote-only motion send our page to their internal champion saying “finally, here’s one we can compare.” That was a side effect we didn’t engineer.
The other thing that surprised us: buyers ask better questions when the price is anchored. A discovery call where the buyer already knows what we cost is a different conversation than one where the price is part of the negotiation. The conversation is about fit, scope, and whether the product solves the problem. The conversation is not about whether we can sneak a number past the procurement function. The conversation is materially better.
What this is not
This is not a claim that public pricing is right for every category. PLG bottoms-up SaaS does it because the user is the buyer. We are not PLG; we are sold to procurement; and the case for public pricing in the procurement-led enterprise category is meaningfully different from the PLG case. We chose it because we are operating against incumbents whose moat is partly the opacity of their pricing. Removing one of the buyer’s reasons not to look at us was worth more, to us, than preserving the optionality we’d have had with quote-only.
If at some point we discover that public pricing is materially hurting the business — that the inbound signal isn’t enough to offset the deals lost from buyers who needed the negotiation theater — we’ll write a post about it. The page is on day-one because we believed it was right. It stays there as long as we still believe.