Why we publish a rate card instead of a contact form
Hiding prices behind a sales conversation is a deliberate choice with predictable effects on who buys and at what price. We chose the other side of that trade, and this is the reasoning.
There is a good reason to hide prices: it lets you charge different customers different amounts for the same thing. That is not a scandal, it is price discrimination, and in enterprise software it is close to universal.
What it costs the buyer
The buyer pays in three currencies. Time, because evaluating three vendors now takes three sales cycles instead of an afternoon. Uncertainty, because the number you are quoted depends on how well you negotiate rather than what you use. And architecture, because you cannot model unit economics for a feature until someone tells you what a call costs.
What publishing costs us
- We cannot charge a well-funded buyer more than a bootstrapped one
- Competitors can see every number we charge, immediately
- We have to be right in public, including when we are wrong
A price you have to ask for is a price that depends on who is asking.
The trade we made
We sell to people who write the integration. That audience evaluates by reading, not by meeting, and a contact form in the middle of an evaluation is a reason to close the tab. Publishing the card is not generosity; it is the only distribution strategy that works on a buyer who does not want to talk to anyone.
It also constrains us usefully. Because the rate card is a published rule — half of HERE's list, tracked as it changes — we cannot quietly raise prices on customers who are not paying attention. The rule is checkable, so it has to be kept.