Glassdoor of SaaS offerings
Because of the pandemic, my company is doing cost cutting and I imagine others do as well. One thing we are doing is finding all the SaaS products that we are paying for and not using and cancelling those accounts, but also we trying to get deals from some of our providers.
I found some providers that list their prices online, and when I contact them they tell me "That's the price, no deals, take it or leave it, everybody gets the same." which I actually appreciate. Other providers go into super sleazy mode, asking me, essentially, how much money I have.
I've heard some accelerators started to have internal documents about what discounts you can get from whom. Is there something public? Something we can all collaborate at? Something like Glassdoor but for SaaS pricing? If not, would you like something like that to exist? I'd be happy to collate data and publish averages and if necessary, build an app around it.
Lastly, what are your opinions on this? Generally I consider transparency a good thing and I'm trying to cut costs to save jobs at my company; but I'm aware that cutting costs cost jobs at other companies. Also, I remember when I was running SaaS companies, there were always 3 or 4 customers that got preferential treatment for some special reason, got a super cheap price and if everybody else expected that price, it would have bankrupted us. One you start aggregating that information, showing averages, max, mins, those nuances get lost. But some company are just taking advantage of companies that can't negotiate as hard and could use the help of more data symmetry.
I'm personally conflicted about this idea, how do you feel?
This also made me think if we can have a startup where you can track all your SaaS payment and turn it off like a knob.
Something like Spendesk?
Personally, I think it's a great idea and would like if it existed. The difficulty Glassdoor can be compelled to de-anonymize the commentors. If you are saying a bad opinion about an employer, that's one thing. If you're violating an NDA contract with a SaaS company, that's actionable.
Hi J. Pablo, I recently worked on something with similar motivation. Would you like to connect with me and perhaps brainstorm on this problem. https://linkedin.com/in/zeeshanejaz
A group of us actually went out and talked to the finance/procurement teams of several large companies to validate this idea a year back. Unfortunately, what we found out was that transparent pricing didn't really matter. As long as the project was within budget, companies don't seem to mind knowing that they may be paying more than others.
I can definitely be proven wrong here though.
Big companies already making millions or billions won’t bother.
Smaller companies / Indie founders will bother about this and give you a custom pricing.
I heard on a podcast a few months ago that there's a club somewhere run by some VC backed companies in the Valley that exchange this sort of information... can't remember the name of it.
Basically, they exchange prices they negotiate on enterprise (1000+ seat contracts)... can't remember the name of it for the life of me.
I think the everyone gets the same price is easier operationally for indy hackers. Some companies are pretty clear about this as a policy.
Companies don't want their prospective customers to share this information and may also require customers to sign NDAs to prevent this.
Also, when a customer gets what may look like lower prices, it may be because of special circumstances or that they are committing to something more than the average customer that would not be possible for others to replicate.