A LOT of SaaS companies think they're the former when in reality they're the latter.

I was once in the "hidden prices are for silly businesses" camp. I've matured in my understanding of this over the years. You'll note that I sell many things, some of which have sticker prices which you can see on the Internet and some of which are priced by "I pick a number from the set of the reals and if you don't like it then let's talk a bit."

If our businesses can reach a mutual understanding of what is being bought and sold without two people talking to each other, sure, let's go with a sticker price. I mean that both in terms of "what it physically is" and "what it is going to do for your business." That's a product. Maybe the offering won't exactly work for your needs or capture all of the available upside, but the great part about taking the expensive Human Attention component out of the loop is that it will be very attractively priced.

You'll note that at the moment I have products (for very different people) selling from everywhere from $9.99 to $2,497 to "$200 a month".

There are some situations, though, where low-touch or medium-touch sales is not quite enough to reach a meeting of the minds between both parties on what they want to get out of the deal. Then we get to high-touch sales. Many intuitions from low-touch sales go out the window then.

I used to do consulting. At the end of my career $30k was a pretty typical week rate for me. The last proposal I ever wrote had 7 figures attached to it. You can reasonably guess that it was not simply "50 weeks at $20k each" for somebody who looked like my typical clients with me doing my typical thing. You can also reasonably guess that "This proposal represents approximately 2X the lifetime billings of my company" would not have been to my advantage if I had stickered it on the website prior to entering the negotiations. (Don't probe for details on this anecdote, please, as it is brought to you by the letters N, D, and A and the number $LOTS.)

Back before I quit consulting, I was publicly available for it but publicly coy about what it would cost. If j.random@example.com wrote me "Hey Patrick, We want to hire you, what would that cost?" I'd get in touch with them and feel them out a bit about what they do and how they were envisioning working together. Occasionally that would mean that I was talking to somebody who couldn't possibly pay any rate I'd consider working at. Sometimes they'd say, after talking for 15 minutes or an hour, "Whoa, you could have saved me some time if you had just quoted that at me. I'll never pay it." Being told this a dozen or a hundred times is worth preserving the option value of being in the solution set for the Fortune 500 or allowing my rates to move faster than common intuition says is reasonable as my demonstrable achievements and changing client base began to allow it.

Also, published pricing versus private pricing is not a value judgment about people who can't afford (or otherwise won't purchase) the thingies on offer. "Moving from private pricing to published pricing will make us more money" is a testable proposition. It is, for some offerings, testably false. Some people passionately believe that it is true in a way which confounds refutation by numbers. Oh well. At least some people believe that about many things. In general, numbers still win.

> Being told this a dozen or a hundred times is worth preserving the option value of being in the solution set for the Fortune 500 or allowing my rates to move faster than common intuition says is reasonable as my demonstrable achievements and changing client base began to allow it.

I didn't understand this sentence. Could someone explain what this means to me?

Hidden pricing will inevitably create some circumstances where a lead and I spend a bit of time talking to each other despite that lead not being a great fit for my services. From my perspective, this is OK, because if I were to unhide my prices it would make it impossible for me to do things like pitch BigCo on a million dollar engagement, which is valuable to me. Unhiding prices would also limit my flexibility in changing them. Over the 2.5 year course of my consulting career they went from $100 an hour to $30k a week, often with discontinuous jumps between engagement N and engagement N+1. Clients who were prepared to pay the price I quoted N+1 might be less inclined to pay it if they were aware that, mere days earlier, I had been charging the rate I charged for engagement N for what might, to that client, feel like "the same" thing.

Allowing him ALSO, to set his rates continually higher then one would expect (fast-growth of pricing, from 20k/week to six figures).

So, it was "ok" to have a "wasted" conversation between parties who couldn't afford his rates, to be able to continually raise his rates for those that could afford it. While, not publishing this pricing, and creating his own ceiling.

Then don't tell us the story. You signed an NDA.

You've created a persuasive, socially powerful HN persona (and I'm sure your consulting income thanks you for it), but at what cost? To gain authority you need to make claims for it and back it up with evidence, otherwise nobody cares. So bragging comes with the territory. To keep up your reputation you are forced to write phrases like "Fortune 500" or "7 figures." No problem.

I'm not criticizing you for it. I'm curious. You obviously made a personal choice to engage in personal branding, so why'd you do it? Does it feel liberating to be so open? Or does it feel tiresome, like you're trapped on a treadmill powering your reputation?