alt Hacker NewsIn the UK as a startup we found buying Silicon Valley SaaS tools to be a bit different sometimes in similar ways.
Europe, even the UK, prices tech startup significantly lower than the US (a colleague once said that in the US you get funding to turn an idea into execution, in Europe you get funding to turn your execution into money), plus we were tech/retail, so our valuation was just never the same as a pure-tech (or SaaS) business.
Because of this, we had numerous SaaS pricing discussions where the sales rep didn't seem to understand that their pricing was just a non-starter for us. "Why wouldn't you pay $15k a month to save half an engineer's worth of work?"... because our engineers don't cost that much, and we don't have that money.
So much of SaaS pricing is predicated on customers being B2B, pure-tech, VC-funded, plenty of funding, with exceptionally high engineering costs. Essentially: cost is not a concern. Most of the world is not going to pay another $30/m subscription for every employee.
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I am at a pretty good (for european standards) startup, entirely bootstrapped with no investor money. We use virtually 0 SaaS ourselves with the exception of tailscale. The pay $40/user/month pricing seems insane for what most of these things do and they are almost always trivial to selfhost. Of course if you have millions of investor money to waste, it’s a drop in the bucket.
Funny, I've recently (and repeatedly) had the exact opposite experience while negotiating SaaS contracts for my largely London-based startup.
Contact UK sales team? They don't believe we could even use their product because we're not a BigCo with thousands of employees. After weeks of back and forth calls, they ask us to pay $100k to get "certified" for API access, with further details on pricing available afterwards. Endless warnings about multiple customers purchasing the API product but lacking the technical ability to implement it.
Contact US sales team? Contract signed and account set up within 2 days, $3k a month. Same company, same product.