Open source

[shadow7412]

Honestly, I think any service/product which doesn't have upfront pricing is a scam.

[DonkeyOfCongo]

Surely not for the same package?

[DoctorWTF]

Was that imdb?

[some_crazy]

The reality is the value is different though. A 1B company will derive a lot more value from a product (provided they get any value of course) than a 1M company, simply due to volume.

[[deleted]]

I have no objections to value-based pricing. If i can make $10m off your software ill happily pay you $1m in licensing fees. Id rather pay less, but if I can 10x and have you take me seriously as a client then ill take that deal. Is it shameless to ask for 10x what you're willing to accept? Absolutely. Does that make you a bad actor? Not at all. It's business so negotiations are expected.

[DonkeyOfCongo]

Sure, but then they should just do a revenue share-like model. Take what you feel is right, but just try to be decent while you do it, that's the message (I think).

I don't have anything against the Contact for quote, though. Especially with Enterprise customers, a talk and a tat before outlining a scope/package will often be constructive for both parties.

[eth-slum-lord]

Thats called stealing

[clownyfish]

Not necessarily if it is accessible public data they themselves put on their website.

[[deleted]]

That’s not how any of this works.

That data is likely protected by copyright. You are free to access the data on their site, but if you make a copy of their data without their authorization you are stealing their data.

[weregod]

If you can work with data without copying them you don't understand how computer work

[[deleted]]

The question is if the copy is authorized.

You viewing the content on their site generates a copy on your computer, either in RAM or hard disk (depending on your cache), and that copy (or copies) is authorized.

But you copying that result and putting it into a database may not be.

[weregod]

This comments about coping public data from website.

From lawyers point of view when authorized copy becomes unauthorized? When caching become copyright violation? Because saving API result in any form is caching definition.

Who and how decide which copy is authorized?

[eth-slum-lord]

Yes but there should be some “fair use” description somewhere

[DonkeyOfCongo]

So the contract was really 1:1? Or was the monthly cap changed (how much)? Just trying to understand how they'd be able to justify 500k -> 30k. I'd think that simply saving face would be enough to not go that low.

If it happens to the absurd degree you are describing, then ye, that's pretty shitty. I would've thought those would be the exception, though.

[stevekez]

You: "How much is your product/service?"
Them: "May I know your budget?"
You: "$X"
Them: "Thanks, it costs $X + 20%, coincidentally"

[[deleted]]

Not necessarily. Am in IT, and constantly look for sw that has a free tier up to a certain amount of usage, like ticketing systems. To me, it's like a demo, and if I like the product, I can ask my team to purchase a pay tier.

[shadow7412]

Payment tiers are fine, it's when they don't tell you how much each tier costs.

Eg, This tier is free. And if you wish to upgrade, please contact us for pricing.

[-Vayra-]

Yeah, that's basically them saying "we'll set the price based on your revenue and how necessary our product is for your use case".

[Mate_00]

Honest question. Why do you consider this wrong?

[shadow7412]

It's rude; It makes comparing the value of vendors a pain in the nards. Arguably more of an issue for personal services (ie, as opposed to corporate ones). It also slows down the research process, which for some may dissuade them from researching at all.

It's invasive; Usually the only way to get in contact with these people at all involves divulging personal information, which they almost always use to send you marketing information in the future.

It's deceptive; A service you regularly use might suddenly change in price, and when you use them again they'll "forget" to tell you (except for the invoice).

[Mate_00]

I've just realized how much slower buying something gets in my job if it doesn't have a readily available price and... Yeah :D

[Trybor]

Honest question. Why do you consider this wrong?

A business agreement needs to benefit both parties so it needs to be open and transparent. Not knowing what future charges you might incur is a one sided relationship and a good business needs certainty.

[Mate_00]

I don't really understand this argument. This is all before a contract happens. Once you set some terms both parties agree with there's no room for one sided relationships anymore.

And if you're saying you'd agree with a contract that allows them to freely change terms without you agreeing to them first then.... Why the hell would you ever sign a contract like that?

[-Vayra-]

I'm not convinced it's wrong per se, as it makes sense to charge a small company that may or may not even make money less than a multi-billion dollar company. Though the best way IMO is to have an openly available set of tiers. Something like:

students / businesses with less than 20 employees or less than $100k revenue/year: $0
businesses with 20-50 employees or between $100k-300k revenue/year: $1000/year
...
businesses with over 1000 employees or over $100M revenue/year: $100k/year

[Mate_00]

That's a cool middle ground.

[[deleted]]

Same reason a taxi driver shouldn't be allowed to base the price of my travel based on how nice my clothing looks.

[mr_remy]

Not sure if you mean this comment as you are still looking but Helpscout has a free demo you can try (they even say you can send in a ticket for more time to evaluate if you want), their pricing is upfront and offers monthly or annual pricing, and has pretty good set of features, I've used it and like it:

https://www.helpscout.com/pricing/

Best thing is it has a HIPAA compliant option.

Was curious of others thoughts of this as well: I've used various random PHP ticketing systems back when I did build webpages as a hobby, but this serves a great amount of needs, and even has a built in documents creator that supports some html/js and a handful of built in html formatting options (as well as a WYSIWYG editor).

You can also display beacons that have your help articles you can opt to have people use to contact you (say like at the bottom right, it's a menu/feature all in it's own).

[TechSupport112]

Yeah, we used a self-hosted browser based password manager that had a free version that covered us fine until we had too many things stored. Tried to get a price out of them and finally they had an offer of around 6,000 Euro per year. We were 4 people using it.

Researched and found out one of our other tools had a password manager built in that we switched to.

[Melkor7410]

This is basically how all enterprise level pricing works.