I didn't dig through the infinite scroll (ironic on a page about designs) but I'm surprised more than half of them weren't dedicated to obfuscating the prices, as has been the vast majority of my experience with trying to figure out how much money I need to give anyone
WITHOUT ever speaking to anyone on the phone or by email, you can scale even $1M a month and get auto-scaled (very deep) discounts with big providers like AWS who certainly have enough "enterprise sales" to waste everyone's time on the phone, suggesting there's no good reason to make anyone talk to your SaaS if they don't have to.
If they have to, because they don't know how to use what they buy, that's one thing. But don't force a call to, let's say, sign in with OIDC or turn on audit logs.
They bother because they don't want competitors to price match or beat their prices. if the prices (and changes are hard to learn about they think they can compete better). I'm not sure if it is worth it - many do go elsewhere to find clear pricing, but they think it matters.
It also means that the price isn't fixed, and that a good negotiator might be able to get a lower price than someone else. The whole "call us" also typically lowers the noise on the vendor's end as well. Anyone willing to take time out to contact them would be a much better chance of closing a sale. They are what would be known as the "good leads". If you're a user and researching multiple vendors with similar services/products/apps that have decent $$$ attached, you'd be a fool to not contact and only pay the price on the tin.
I agree with you entirely on the possibility of being able to save money by calling and negotiating, but if I'm evaluating two options, and one shows me pricing and lets me sign up without talking to anyone, and the other will require a phone call, I will most likely not be calling and giving that company any money.
This is, of course, one of the many reasons why I don't run a large, VC-scale business. I don't have the patience or desire to play these sorts of games.
I agree re: quality of leads, but also wonder how many sales are lost to competitors _with_ advertised pricing purely because the user didn't want the hassle of talking to sales (maybe not purely, but you get the gist).
Depending on the business, that could be a customer you wouldn't want anyways. Customers looking solely for lowest price tend to be nightmare customers that would in the long run be more expensive as a customer than just not having them as a customer at all.
Companies that seek to convert every single potential sale and feel a non-sale is a net loss tend to be the companies that I as a potential customer do not want to be a customer of. They tend to have shite customer support anyways.
At the end of the day, the "contact us" pricing clearly is not something that ends companies, otherwise nobody would use it.
I'm confused; you seem to be arguing opposite things. A few comments above, you say:
> ["Call for pricing"] also means that the price isn't fixed, and that a good negotiator might be able to get a lower price than someone else.
But you also say:
> [A potential customer who doesn't want to talk to sales] could be a customer you wouldn't want anyways. Customers looking solely for lowest price tend to be nightmare customers...
So the potential customer who does call for pricing -- possibly with the intent to negotiate that price down -- is also potentially that nightmare customer who is just looking for the lowest price and will be a drag on your time and resources.
To me, the potential customer who just wants to get started without needing to suffer through a call with a sales person... well, that customer sounds at least as likely to be someone who will be a nice, quiet customer who uses your product and doesn't call or write in with inane complaints and issues all the time.
I don't think this is a good signal. I do agree that a potential customer who calls is probably more likely to sign up, but it's still an extra barrier to customer acquisition, no matter how you slice it.
In my experience, "call for quote" type places are way more expensive than $5.99/month type of things. It's usually for the plans that for more than 2,000/perX that get those. At that point, it is definitely a negotiation. These places feel like just because your website receives X hits per hour/day/week translates to you being able to pay for a higher rate to do something like license a font/image/music.
The places that are using 'call for quote' on things available on Walmart tend to be people that don't want people of Walmart listed as a customer. However, again, in my experience, I haven't seen one of these. It's been for things that are going to have sticker shock level pricing.
The problem is this discussion is too abstract. There is a big difference between a 10 pack of cheap pens and a custom made pen - depending on which we are talking about different things make sense. Likewise it could be a sheet of paper or replace all the printers in the office. Some things call and we will figure out pricing make a lot of sense, while for others it doesn't. When you realize all of the above exists with call us prices but they are sold differently it starts to make sense why the signal is both good and bad to different people - we are thinking of different situations and so the signal means different things.
Good negotiator would need leverage and in most cases that won’t exist for a product that understands its own value well. These are priced on value, the call us definitely lowers the noise but it has more to do with the target demo being enterprise large customer deals. Not providing pricing gives sales the ability to try to price it for value to capture maximum margin.
It is most definitely about the products sales team sizing up the potential client and how much they can get the client to pay, based on the company size and turn over.
It's possible for the client to negotiate, but the product sales team have jack up the price way over their internal list price, so any client savings is only a fallacy
> good negotiator might be able to get a lower price than someone else.
A good negotiator is worried about more than price. There is quality, time to get the product, support. An lot of other things on those lines that I can't think of at the moment too. A good negotiator knows what is important to them and how to make the best trade off for their situation. Sometimes a good negotiator will offer more than the asking price because they know those others are important and if the company goes out of business they get none of them (this is rare, but it is sometimes needed).
That depends - I've seen contact us pricing on things that are cheap at walmart. They are losing money on every sale because the time for someone on the phone is more than gross profit (not net)
I get that they don't want to show the price. But why have 3 tiers then? The sales person will have to explain the differences anyway again during the call
They do have "contact sales" as a filter option which is nice if you're looking for examples of that. It only has one (not that great IMO) example though.
I don't know if they were the first but I think of 37signals and Basecamp as the ones that first nailed the multi-column/highlighted plan form of design that has become so dominant.
Also interesting: they list their plans, from left to right, from most expensive to least expensive (and their current plan pages do the same). I feel like that's rare? I can't remember the last pricing page I've seen that lists it that way, aside from these. All the ones I can (dimly) recall start with the cheapest (or free) option on the left.
huh, to me they look really, really similar, just a little more emphasis/direction on the basecamp page and a simpler set of offerings with more details each for hey.com.
If I ever create a trendy SaaS company (or an untrendy one for that matter), I'm definitely cribbing the 'pay more if you have accountants on staff' criteria... love it!
A lot of this comes down to A/B testing. Once people have found a solution that converts some number of customers, it's hard to take risks. There are alternative designs, but it's safest to just go with what is known. In some cases, the familiarity is helpful for users, but there is no denying that it can be boring. These are the unfortunate constraints that many talented people have to work in.
Investor Portal Software Solutions from Investor Portal Pro are custom, built on customer AWS accounts, and based on a toolkit. We'll soon be launching a SaaS version, but not sure I want the pricing pages like these. I want a single price point (per user) that takes people right into the software after paying.
Simplicity is tough, and it's hard to understand which option would be more affordable without a pricing 'calculator'.
Here's our current pricing page (for the on-prem) version
And we wonder why code generating LLMs are... wait, never mind, we don't wonder. Of course, my pricing page looks different for now but will end up looking much the same since that's what visitors generally expect.
I've always wanted to know: Are people actually interested in more granular pricing options? I.e. give me 10x more tokens but miss me with that image generation, or give me more bandwith but still only one domain. It feels like nowadays 80% of stuff in pricing packages isn't really used by people paying for it, but they can't opt out of it...
I would be except that the feeling seems to be that you get screwed either way:
* Tiers (aka new car model): something is always strategically left out of the otherwise "ideal" tier to force you up a level, even though you won't use most of the other options. Sometimes the "nearly there" tier is artificially expensive to drive you to the higher tier - the same trick as a medium coffee being only fractionally cheaper than the large. Sometimes there's a ratchet where you can upgrade but a downgrade is a huge hassle and/or penalised.
* A la carte (aka the car/dishwasher spares model): every option feels expensive and you feel like you're being nickel-and-dimed and you know the marginal cost of providing that option was small
* Top-up (aka the phone minutes model): top ups are obscenely expensive and are either a punishment for being "cheap" (i.e. prudent) or act as a threat to push you up a tier in the first place
Add a few special offers, points, cost sinks and lock-ins (especially where hardware is involved), rewards and all that crap here and there to muddy it up to prevent a clear comparison being made. I basically assume all subscriptions are doing some kind of mind-games or scam with every little aspect of the pricing.
Not that a fair price can't be any of the above options. The vendor has to cover the overheads somewhere!
Research suggests consumers actually prefer fewer choices - the "paradox of choice" shows that highly granular pricing often increases decision paralysis and cart abandonment rather than improving conversion rates.
I too think that has some weight to it, but there's no reason we can't have both.
Before the LLM boom, I wouldn't have thought twice about having fine-grained options, but since then, every SaaS company on the face of the planet has forcibly bundled ChatGPT and its ilk and jacked up prices — LLM crap I don't use and don't plan to use in its current state.
Similarly, many might wanna go initially with a simple option but later, based on their usage, whittle it down to the few that are relevant, save money in the process, and commit to the company.
Want a single product? It's only available for annual subscriptions for hundreds of dollars, with huge cancellation fees (the rest of the year). But it comes with a dozen or so products you'll never download lol
> Are people actually interested in more granular pricing options?
Yes. Welcome to the world of committed contracts, call-us pricing, and “partnerships. At many-zeroes scale every cent is negotiated to the point that you’ll get different pricing based on the hour of the day that you make the API call.
I love pricing pages, I avoid landing pages or whatever they want to me read and go directly to pricing page to get the meat of what they offer... then I look at price.
Totally. It tells me who the target audience is and if there's actually a free tier. It tells me if the paid plan is 5$ per month, per user or fixed, or 500$ per month. It's kinda shocking how many times I have no idea which one it will be until I find the pricing page.
I’m the same way — I skip straight to pricing too.
Curious though: when you get there, do you prefer seeing a few fixed tiers (like the classic “3 bucket” layout), or would you rather have a usage-based formula where you can adjust a slider or input your exact needs and see the price change in real time?
One of my biggest peeves in pricing pages is the "feature diff". There are so many redundant features listed between tiers - or products - that many would be better off not showing features that are largely the same.
This is the second most important page on your website. The first is a clear description of the product. Without a pricing page people immediately think your pricing and contracts are predatory and probably covering up product deficiencies with contractual lockins.
So many sites get the first wrong, that you'd just expect the second to be bad as well. So many pages leave you wondering WTF does this do even after reading all of the information of the home page. I hate sites with landing pages before the home page too for sites that only offer the one thing.
The "style" tags/filters don't seem to be very good. The definitions of them aren't very clear from the names alone, and I can't really tell what they are from the examples within the category. Would be great to have a definition and a basic wireframe example of each style.
I'd also love to be able to filter out a style, to drill down to the examples that aren't just the multi-tier ("free/basic/pro/enterprise") vertical cards (which doesn't seem to have a dedicated style tag—maybe "Stacked Cards"? but there's a lot that look like that that don't have that tag).
It's probably too much work, but it would be nice to see a short comment on the "curated" examples to better understand the reasoning behind the assessment. Why was it included ? What was particularly good about it? That might help people choose the right ones for their use case.
I didn't dig through the infinite scroll (ironic on a page about designs) but I'm surprised more than half of them weren't dedicated to obfuscating the prices, as has been the vast majority of my experience with trying to figure out how much money I need to give anyone
<font size=small>call us</font>
<h3>let's talk!</h3>
or my other pet peeve https://lucidic.ai/#:~:text=Get%20started%20for%20free aka don't worry about it until you like it!
WITHOUT ever speaking to anyone on the phone or by email, you can scale even $1M a month and get auto-scaled (very deep) discounts with big providers like AWS who certainly have enough "enterprise sales" to waste everyone's time on the phone, suggesting there's no good reason to make anyone talk to your SaaS if they don't have to.
If they have to, because they don't know how to use what they buy, that's one thing. But don't force a call to, let's say, sign in with OIDC or turn on audit logs.
Yeah, I'm looking for some GRC compliance software and there are so many vendor with pricing page that just has 3 columns of Call us! Why even bother?
They bother because they don't want competitors to price match or beat their prices. if the prices (and changes are hard to learn about they think they can compete better). I'm not sure if it is worth it - many do go elsewhere to find clear pricing, but they think it matters.
It also means that the price isn't fixed, and that a good negotiator might be able to get a lower price than someone else. The whole "call us" also typically lowers the noise on the vendor's end as well. Anyone willing to take time out to contact them would be a much better chance of closing a sale. They are what would be known as the "good leads". If you're a user and researching multiple vendors with similar services/products/apps that have decent $$$ attached, you'd be a fool to not contact and only pay the price on the tin.
I agree with you entirely on the possibility of being able to save money by calling and negotiating, but if I'm evaluating two options, and one shows me pricing and lets me sign up without talking to anyone, and the other will require a phone call, I will most likely not be calling and giving that company any money.
This is, of course, one of the many reasons why I don't run a large, VC-scale business. I don't have the patience or desire to play these sorts of games.
I agree re: quality of leads, but also wonder how many sales are lost to competitors _with_ advertised pricing purely because the user didn't want the hassle of talking to sales (maybe not purely, but you get the gist).
Depending on the business, that could be a customer you wouldn't want anyways. Customers looking solely for lowest price tend to be nightmare customers that would in the long run be more expensive as a customer than just not having them as a customer at all.
Companies that seek to convert every single potential sale and feel a non-sale is a net loss tend to be the companies that I as a potential customer do not want to be a customer of. They tend to have shite customer support anyways.
At the end of the day, the "contact us" pricing clearly is not something that ends companies, otherwise nobody would use it.
I'm confused; you seem to be arguing opposite things. A few comments above, you say:
> ["Call for pricing"] also means that the price isn't fixed, and that a good negotiator might be able to get a lower price than someone else.
But you also say:
> [A potential customer who doesn't want to talk to sales] could be a customer you wouldn't want anyways. Customers looking solely for lowest price tend to be nightmare customers...
So the potential customer who does call for pricing -- possibly with the intent to negotiate that price down -- is also potentially that nightmare customer who is just looking for the lowest price and will be a drag on your time and resources.
To me, the potential customer who just wants to get started without needing to suffer through a call with a sales person... well, that customer sounds at least as likely to be someone who will be a nice, quiet customer who uses your product and doesn't call or write in with inane complaints and issues all the time.
I don't think this is a good signal. I do agree that a potential customer who calls is probably more likely to sign up, but it's still an extra barrier to customer acquisition, no matter how you slice it.
In my experience, "call for quote" type places are way more expensive than $5.99/month type of things. It's usually for the plans that for more than 2,000/perX that get those. At that point, it is definitely a negotiation. These places feel like just because your website receives X hits per hour/day/week translates to you being able to pay for a higher rate to do something like license a font/image/music.
The places that are using 'call for quote' on things available on Walmart tend to be people that don't want people of Walmart listed as a customer. However, again, in my experience, I haven't seen one of these. It's been for things that are going to have sticker shock level pricing.
The problem is this discussion is too abstract. There is a big difference between a 10 pack of cheap pens and a custom made pen - depending on which we are talking about different things make sense. Likewise it could be a sheet of paper or replace all the printers in the office. Some things call and we will figure out pricing make a lot of sense, while for others it doesn't. When you realize all of the above exists with call us prices but they are sold differently it starts to make sense why the signal is both good and bad to different people - we are thinking of different situations and so the signal means different things.
Good negotiator would need leverage and in most cases that won’t exist for a product that understands its own value well. These are priced on value, the call us definitely lowers the noise but it has more to do with the target demo being enterprise large customer deals. Not providing pricing gives sales the ability to try to price it for value to capture maximum margin.
It is most definitely about the products sales team sizing up the potential client and how much they can get the client to pay, based on the company size and turn over. It's possible for the client to negotiate, but the product sales team have jack up the price way over their internal list price, so any client savings is only a fallacy
> good negotiator might be able to get a lower price than someone else.
A good negotiator is worried about more than price. There is quality, time to get the product, support. An lot of other things on those lines that I can't think of at the moment too. A good negotiator knows what is important to them and how to make the best trade off for their situation. Sometimes a good negotiator will offer more than the asking price because they know those others are important and if the company goes out of business they get none of them (this is rare, but it is sometimes needed).
That depends - I've seen contact us pricing on things that are cheap at walmart. They are losing money on every sale because the time for someone on the phone is more than gross profit (not net)
I get that they don't want to show the price. But why have 3 tiers then? The sales person will have to explain the differences anyway again during the call
They do have "contact sales" as a filter option which is nice if you're looking for examples of that. It only has one (not that great IMO) example though.
Agreed, some got dropped so will be addressing this! Appreciate the comment
I don't know if they were the first but I think of 37signals and Basecamp as the ones that first nailed the multi-column/highlighted plan form of design that has become so dominant.
Here's 2009: https://web.archive.org/web/20090307125843/http://www.baseca...
if you go back to 2007 you can see the same structure in a plainer presentation; it's easy to see how they went from one to the other: https://web.archive.org/web/20070831191822/http://www.baseca...
Pretty interesting!
Also interesting: they list their plans, from left to right, from most expensive to least expensive (and their current plan pages do the same). I feel like that's rare? I can't remember the last pricing page I've seen that lists it that way, aside from these. All the ones I can (dimly) recall start with the cheapest (or free) option on the left.
… and neither Hey nor Basecamp (both from 37Signals) use that layout style anymore.
https://www.hey.com/pricing/
https://basecamp.com/pricing
huh, to me they look really, really similar, just a little more emphasis/direction on the basecamp page and a simpler set of offerings with more details each for hey.com.
The SaaS internet is so boring! These are like carbon copies of each other.
I had one of those for S3stat for a while. It lost decisively in A/B tests to the ugly wall of text that it replaced, so that’s what’s up there today:
https://www.s3stat.com/Pricing.aspx
I’m still waiting for the next generation of trendy SaaS companies to crib it.
I love your page. Being an authentic human and actually having some personality seem to be like secret weapons these days.
If I ever create a trendy SaaS company (or an untrendy one for that matter), I'm definitely cribbing the 'pay more if you have accountants on staff' criteria... love it!
> "We'll even put on a little tie when we talk to you on the phone".
Love it.
A lot of this comes down to A/B testing. Once people have found a solution that converts some number of customers, it's hard to take risks. There are alternative designs, but it's safest to just go with what is known. In some cases, the familiarity is helpful for users, but there is no denying that it can be boring. These are the unfortunate constraints that many talented people have to work in.
Given how badly I’ve seen a/b tests being conducted at multiple companies, I’m not sure I’d assume anything from competitors works particularly well.
I can guarantee from my experience that most internet marketing practices are determined by the blind leading the blind.
Certainly my experience as well.
Would concur 100% on "blind leading the blind" here.
Investor Portal Software Solutions from Investor Portal Pro are custom, built on customer AWS accounts, and based on a toolkit. We'll soon be launching a SaaS version, but not sure I want the pricing pages like these. I want a single price point (per user) that takes people right into the software after paying.
Simplicity is tough, and it's hard to understand which option would be more affordable without a pricing 'calculator'.
Here's our current pricing page (for the on-prem) version
Feedback welcome!
https://investorportalpro.com/pricing.html
ngl this looks like ass
Isn't that a good thing? Let's you compare easily.
It seems like you see either 3-4 columns, or a link to arrange a conference call with a salesperson (e.g. a “don’t-bother-button”)
I'd like to see a pricing page where if you get the ball though the hoop, or some other challenge, you get a discount.
And we wonder why code generating LLMs are... wait, never mind, we don't wonder. Of course, my pricing page looks different for now but will end up looking much the same since that's what visitors generally expect.
Not being boring doesn’t translate to $$, however.
Yeah. Literally all of them are .flex-row>.pricing-card*4.
I've always wanted to know: Are people actually interested in more granular pricing options? I.e. give me 10x more tokens but miss me with that image generation, or give me more bandwith but still only one domain. It feels like nowadays 80% of stuff in pricing packages isn't really used by people paying for it, but they can't opt out of it...
I would be except that the feeling seems to be that you get screwed either way:
* Tiers (aka new car model): something is always strategically left out of the otherwise "ideal" tier to force you up a level, even though you won't use most of the other options. Sometimes the "nearly there" tier is artificially expensive to drive you to the higher tier - the same trick as a medium coffee being only fractionally cheaper than the large. Sometimes there's a ratchet where you can upgrade but a downgrade is a huge hassle and/or penalised.
* A la carte (aka the car/dishwasher spares model): every option feels expensive and you feel like you're being nickel-and-dimed and you know the marginal cost of providing that option was small
* Top-up (aka the phone minutes model): top ups are obscenely expensive and are either a punishment for being "cheap" (i.e. prudent) or act as a threat to push you up a tier in the first place
Add a few special offers, points, cost sinks and lock-ins (especially where hardware is involved), rewards and all that crap here and there to muddy it up to prevent a clear comparison being made. I basically assume all subscriptions are doing some kind of mind-games or scam with every little aspect of the pricing.
Not that a fair price can't be any of the above options. The vendor has to cover the overheads somewhere!
Research suggests consumers actually prefer fewer choices - the "paradox of choice" shows that highly granular pricing often increases decision paralysis and cart abandonment rather than improving conversion rates.
I too think that has some weight to it, but there's no reason we can't have both.
Before the LLM boom, I wouldn't have thought twice about having fine-grained options, but since then, every SaaS company on the face of the planet has forcibly bundled ChatGPT and its ilk and jacked up prices — LLM crap I don't use and don't plan to use in its current state.
Similarly, many might wanna go initially with a simple option but later, based on their usage, whittle it down to the few that are relevant, save money in the process, and commit to the company.
Adobe's subscription is so bad for this.
Want a single product? It's only available for annual subscriptions for hundreds of dollars, with huge cancellation fees (the rest of the year). But it comes with a dozen or so products you'll never download lol
> Are people actually interested in more granular pricing options?
Yes. Welcome to the world of committed contracts, call-us pricing, and “partnerships. At many-zeroes scale every cent is negotiated to the point that you’ll get different pricing based on the hour of the day that you make the API call.
Still waiting for micropayments after 50 years...
I love pricing pages, I avoid landing pages or whatever they want to me read and go directly to pricing page to get the meat of what they offer... then I look at price.
Totally. It tells me who the target audience is and if there's actually a free tier. It tells me if the paid plan is 5$ per month, per user or fixed, or 500$ per month. It's kinda shocking how many times I have no idea which one it will be until I find the pricing page.
I’m the same way — I skip straight to pricing too. Curious though: when you get there, do you prefer seeing a few fixed tiers (like the classic “3 bucket” layout), or would you rather have a usage-based formula where you can adjust a slider or input your exact needs and see the price change in real time?
One of my biggest peeves in pricing pages is the "feature diff". There are so many redundant features listed between tiers - or products - that many would be better off not showing features that are largely the same.
Then how would you see and compare everything you're getting in a given package?
This is the second most important page on your website. The first is a clear description of the product. Without a pricing page people immediately think your pricing and contracts are predatory and probably covering up product deficiencies with contractual lockins.
So many sites get the first wrong, that you'd just expect the second to be bad as well. So many pages leave you wondering WTF does this do even after reading all of the information of the home page. I hate sites with landing pages before the home page too for sites that only offer the one thing.
The "style" tags/filters don't seem to be very good. The definitions of them aren't very clear from the names alone, and I can't really tell what they are from the examples within the category. Would be great to have a definition and a basic wireframe example of each style.
I'd also love to be able to filter out a style, to drill down to the examples that aren't just the multi-tier ("free/basic/pro/enterprise") vertical cards (which doesn't seem to have a dedicated style tag—maybe "Stacked Cards"? but there's a lot that look like that that don't have that tag).
Great feedback and will be addressing this! Appreciate the thoughts
Also see Paywall Screens: 10k screenshots of paywalls in mobile apps.
https://www.paywallscreens.com/
I didn't know about this! Does anyone have any other good repositories for app design patterns?
Great!
WOW!
It's probably too much work, but it would be nice to see a short comment on the "curated" examples to better understand the reasoning behind the assessment. Why was it included ? What was particularly good about it? That might help people choose the right ones for their use case.
Good point and will take a look! Appreciate it
A simple text page is good enough for us: https://geocoder.ca/pricing
Please consider making this responsive on mobile!
There’s also this:
https://opengraphexamples.com/
Collection of open graph image examples.
Just wanted to say this is wonderful work, timely for a couple of my companies, and I love seeing stuff like it posted to HN.
Is there anything like this for other components of the modern webapp?
this is great. one suggestion, it would be nice if I can filter based on subscriptions vs. one time payments.
Great idea, will add this! Appreciate it
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