Hey HN! Christine and Steven here. As a PM and engineer, we’ve both evaluated and purchased a lot of software. One of the biggest frustrations was figuring out how much it would cost us without having to go through the sales process. When we did have a quote, we had no idea if we were getting a good deal or ripped off.
We built a site where you can see what other companies are actually paying for SaaS and enterprise software. Buyers contribute prices via quotes, pricing proposals, and other documentation to ensure quality.
We unlocked Talkdesk for Show HN users so that you can use the product without needing to sign in or upgrade. Check it out at https://www.pricelevel.com/showhn. Would love to hear any feedback, thank you!
However, as a provider I can totally see a situation where I (proverbially, I'm not in this business) sue you for disclosing what amounts to a trade secret (depending on what's in the fine print) and compel you to give up all documents so I can go after my loose-lipped client too.
I hope you've got your legal bases covered
Our microsoft reseller was using pricing and contract info on a deal he closed last week to assure us he would and could get us a similar deal.
Gartner will literally cutthtoat re-negotiate any large contract you have, using pricing data they have gathered from their members.
Call them up tomorrow, tell them your current cost for Splunk, they will tell you exactly how much you can save.
So this type of thing is not illegal and not even frowned upon for the big players.
I personally hate it but it's just how the game is played and it's why all enterprise software has stupidly high advertised prices so they can give "90% discounts" and let people think that is a good deal when it is ultimately just the real price that all the big players are getting anyway.
You'll see there's some cited court cases that supported pricing as a trade secret, and some that held it was not.
It seems to be still pretty muddy legally.
This is with the obvious caveat that public tenders are the exception, but only after it's awarded
I had to get a lot of quotes and talking to legal is painful.
This is ridiculous.
If there's one piece of information that is public by nature in a free market is price, folks.
We should bash on any business that tries to manipulate the legal system to destroy price publicity. They should be the ones in fear.
The whole concept of a market does not work without price transparency. The more price transparency, the more efficient the market.
I don't see this holding in court aside from the company needing to remove that info from the site.
You are not beholden to NDA you have not signed, and it woudld be employee that shared it breaking any agreements, not the company that then shared it.
Sure you may be able to find some unscrupulous attorney who will make the argument that you charging $5 for one thing and $6 for another is somehow a "trade secret" so they can keep on billing, but that's only "legitimate" in the sense that a dictator is legitimate because they hold power. Price transparency and discoverability is a bedrock tenant of free market capitalism and any market to the contrary should be viewed as a direct attack on the free market. It's about as un-American a thing as you can get.
Source: I'm a 3L about to graduate with an IP specialization and got an award for being the best student in my trade secret law class.
Is there a basis for this in recent case law? And how difficult would it be to enforce against a 3rd party actively publishing pricing, and therefore competitive, strategy?
Nope I'm not staying they should shut down or they will get sued, but they should do the sensible thing and talk to a good lawyer
(1) https://www.lplegal.com/content/what-are-trade-secrets-and-h...
Not making a value judgement and happy to be corrected if this is not a thing.
I've found in competitive price analysis there's some companies that do very, very, well at hiding their pricing. If they've worked that hard, that long, to protect/hide pricing they're not going to take it lying down.
As an operator, I know a lot of SaaS agreements include language saying the customer will protect the vendor's confidential data including information about pricing. I doubt it's legal in the majority of the time for buyers to share this data. And if the buyer is sharing confidential data with you, you're likely taking on risk by sharing it publicly, even in aggregate form.
You could add something saying that the buyer agrees that they have the legal rights to share the information with you, to protect yourself. But at some point you should know that the majority of the time, even if that box is checked, they don't.
For even more privacy you could show faceted aggregates with error bars instead of individual accounts once your samples are big enough.
I don't care if it's $91,132 or $90,725 or $91,412 - all of those are effectively the same as $91k (unless I'm the vendor trying to work out who's leaking my pricing).
What I'm looking for as a potential new customer is to see if it's going toi cost me ~200k or ~90k or ~10k or ~3k.
731 seats @ $77492.32 could be ~700-750 seats at ~$75k-$80k and that's still a useful guide for me.
A lot of estimations are done with "t-shirt sizes", and just knowing a rough range with a rough margin of error makes things so much easier. I'll let my procurement team fight for the $3k or 31 user difference, and do the back and forth with quotes, but I can run w/ those broad numbers right now
> Buyers contribute prices via quotes, pricing proposals, and other documentation to ensure quality.
Stop using words that makes it sounds like a crime. It’s a survey. Nobody is under any legal requirement to provide correct info.
If the data is only shared in an aggregate fashion, I doubt they can do much without a subpoena. And then what? Sue the website? Sorry, no. Section 230.
John Doe suits against anonymous customers?
Nothing requires PriceLevel to retain the PII of users… they can capture the data, validate, and flush the PII. “Sorry, we have no information about the contributor of this data.”
My sense is this will be the primary innovation of this service— how to get this info and keep it useful to end users without very much ability to vet it. Worth the effort.
How many TalkDesk customers do you suppose there are paying $91,132 for 62 users?
I'd guess TalkDesk know exactly who that is.
(I doubt that makes it any easier to prevail if they try to sue them, but I wouldn't want to be the customer negotiating next years contract wit them.
"Hi, it's TalkDesk account management here. Just letting you know your contract expires at the end of next month. Here's a new contract for the following 12 months, with the special for you pricing of $425,762 for your 62 seats. Hope to hear from you soon, and have a nice day!"
I'm curious how you look at that? Are there any legal risks for end users to share this type of information via your site? I'm thinking if the SaaS providers have some legal statements about not sharing prices (similar to how certain database providers don't allow sharing of database benchmarks).
While there may be some SaaS companies who don't like this level of transparency, we hope this actually leads to a faster sales cycle because buyers have pre-qualified themselves.
But by obfuscating their pricing they are able to create a marketing "lead" when you contact them that will one day evolve into a client and therefor its better for them to "pre-qualify" you.
I personally hate this model as it drives me absolutely insane to spend a month of going back and forth with a vendor, going over what i'd like to do and why, investing time in understanding their stack and product, only to find out its 2x my budget or something like they wont even consider me since its less than 10k. If you hide your pricing, make me go through an extensive process, and I let you know im trying to implement a PoC or a small entry level and you come at me with $1k/month I'm likely going to walk away and be frustrated enough to not want to do business with you ever. You've created more of a negative experience that i will tell others about than a "lead". Yet this goes against every companies thinking (even my won) so it must work on someone.
Unless "$91,132" is an indicative but somewhat randomised number, I'd strongly suggest listing that as "$91k" to reduce the information leakage about which customer gave you that number. (Same with the number of seats, although it looks like there's less entropy in this numbers at a quick glance.)
But yeah, the number of times I've seen management spreadsheets doing math on "$" where "$" is a weakly-typed mix of $/mo & $/yr, and then the "result" used to "justify" decisions…