"Enterprise: Contact Sales"
You've seen this button a hundred times. Maybe a thousand.
Translation: "We're going to charge you as much as we think we can get away with."
I'm not calling these companies evil. Most of them are just running the playbook they inherited. But the playbook itself — the whole apparatus of qualification calls, artificial scarcity, negotiation theater, and lock-in mechanics — that's the problem. The playbook is broken. It's been broken. And someone should say it out loud, so here I am, saying it out loud.
How the Machine Works
Pull back the curtain and enterprise pricing follows the same script every time. Four steps. Like a boss fight with a pattern you can memorize.
Qualification. A sales rep figures out how big your company is, how desperate you are, and how much budget you probably have. This isn't about finding the right fit. It's about maximizing extraction. They're sizing you up the way a street vendor sizes up a tourist.
Artificial scarcity. Features get locked behind tiers. Basic functionality becomes "premium." Integrations that cost the company nothing to provide become $30/month add-ons. The software could work better for you right now, today, but they'd rather you pay extra for the privilege.
The dance. Now begins the negotiation theater. They quote high. You push back. They "check with their manager" — who was listening the whole time, by the way. You both pretend this isn't a colossal waste of everyone's time. If you've ever spent 42 days in back-and-forth emails just to get a straight answer on what a piece of software costs, you know this dance. You know it in your bones.
Lock-in. Once you're in, switching costs keep you there. Prices creep up annually — 8%, 12%, sometimes 20% with a cheerful email about "expanded capabilities." Features you relied on migrate to higher tiers. The relationship that started with a handshake quietly becomes a hostage situation, and the ransom goes up every January.
This is not how software should work.
Why $15
Our radical proposition: we just tell you the price.
$15/seat/month.
We're inspired by companies like Basecamp, who've been transparent about pricing since before it was fashionable, and people like DHH, who've spent years proving that profitable, sustainable software companies don't need pricing games or venture capital or growth-at-all-costs mentality to thrive. They proved the model works. We're following the signal.
No tiers. Everyone gets everything. We're not going to wall off the features that make the product actually useful and call it a "growth plan." If you want 1,000 seats, that's $15,000/month. The math isn't complicated, and we're not going to pretend it is.
No negotiations. The price is the price. We're not going to charge you more because your company sounds big on the phone or because you seem desperate in the demo. That would be disrespectful. And honestly? Exhausting. Life's too short.
No surprise fees. No implementation fees. No training costs. No premium support tier where you pay extra for someone to actually help you when things break. We'll help you get set up because we want you to succeed — not because we spotted another line item to bill.
"How Can You Afford This?"
Fair question. Honest answer:
We don't have a sales team. Those enterprise negotiations require expensive humans in expensive chairs sending expensive follow-up emails. By publishing our price, we eliminate that entire cost. The savings go to you. Don't overthink it.
We build efficiently. Small team. Ship what matters. Don't maintain features nobody uses. We're not a venture-backed company burning investor money on a growth curve that looks good in pitch decks. We're building a business, not a fundraising story.
We're not trying to get acquired. A lot of pricing insanity traces back to companies optimizing for acquisition multiples instead of sustainable business. Revenue-per-seat metrics that look attractive to buyers. Growth numbers that justify the next round. We're building something we want to run for decades. This is the way. Your subscription isn't our exit strategy.
The Problem With Free
Speaking of pricing: free tiers.
"Free" software isn't free. You're paying with your data being aggregated and sold. With your time spent fighting limitations designed to frustrate you into upgrading. With your trust, which evaporates when the company pivots, gets acquired, or shuts down and takes your setup with it.
We don't have a free tier. We have a free trial. Try everything. Use every feature. Then decide if $15/month is worth it.
If it's not, no hard feelings. If it is, you know exactly what you're paying. No mysteries. No gotchas. Allons-y.
A Challenge
To every B2B software company still hiding behind "contact sales": just publish your price.
If you're confident in what you've built, you don't need negotiation theater. If your pricing is fair, you don't need to hide it. If your product is good, the price won't scare people away.
The mystery will.
Josh has sat through enough "let me check with my manager" calls to mass-produce a small ulcer. He believes pricing should be simple, transparent, and fair — the kind of thing you can explain to someone in a single sentence without needing a slide deck. He once calculated that negotiating his last enterprise software purchase required approximately 1.21 gigawatts of mental energy. cStar is his proof that there's a better way.