Why We Publish Our Pricing Instead of Hiding It

Try to find pricing on most IT service management platforms and you will hit the same wall almost every time. A page that says some version of "contact sales for a custom quote." Maybe a form. Sometimes a chatbot promising that someone will reach out within one business day. Almost never a number you can act on.

We do it differently, on purpose. Every plan, and every application you can actually buy today, has its price sitting on our pricing page right now, for anyone to read without handing over an email address first. That includes Enterprise, which is the tier most vendors leave as "Custom" and ours carries a per-agent number like the two below it. The handful of apps we have not shipped yet say so plainly instead of showing a figure we would only have to revise. But nothing that has a price keeps it a secret.

Part of this article is about why we made that choice. Most of it is about what to do when the vendor you are evaluating has not.

Why Companies Hide Pricing in the First Place

It is usually not because there is something to hide. It is because hidden pricing gives a sales team room to move. They can charge more when a customer clearly has budget, charge less when they need to close before the quarter ends, and steer the whole conversation before a prospect ever gets to compare numbers and walk away to think about it. For a large company with a trained sales floor and a real pipeline to manage, that is a rational strategy. It has worked for decades in enterprise software precisely because the buyer usually has no independent source of information.

We are not that company. We are three people. The same person having the sales conversation is also the person answering support questions the next morning. We could not run a negotiation-heavy sales process even if we wanted to, and we do not want to.

What the Wall Actually Costs You

The real cost of hidden pricing is not the irritation of not knowing. It is the sequence you have to complete before you are allowed to know: book a call, sit through a demo built to establish rapport before revealing anything concrete, receive a quote, take it for internal approval, go back for a second call to negotiate. Only then do you find out whether the tool was ever in your budget at all.

That routinely takes weeks. And the information you were waiting on is the one piece that should have taken thirty seconds to check on day one, before you spent any of your team's attention on it.

There is a second cost that is easier to miss. Every hour you spend in that process is an hour you are not spending on the two or three other tools on your shortlist, which means the vendor with the longest sales cycle quietly gets the most of your evaluation time. That is not an accident. It is the mechanism working as designed.

 Five Questions That Get You a Real Number Anyway

You will not change how a vendor prices. You can change how quickly you find out what it will cost. These five questions do most of the work, and they work on any vendor, including us.

• Ask for the rate card before the demo, not after. "Send me your standard pricing and I will come to the call with real questions." A vendor who cannot produce one before a demo is telling you the number depends on what they learn about you during it.
• Ask the price of the unit that grows. Not the bundle price. The per-agent, per-asset, per-configuration-item, per-workflow-run, per-gigabyte price. Your bill in year three is that unit price multiplied by a number nobody can predict today, so it matters far more than the headline.
• Ask what is included and what is a separate line. Demos show the whole platform. Quotes rarely cover it. Walk back through what you were shown, feature by feature, and ask which SKU each one sits on.
• Ask what the renewal looks like, in writing. Specifically whether the uplift is capped. A first-year price that is unusually good with no cap on year two is a loan, not a discount.
• Ask what it costs at twice your size. You are not buying for today's headcount. If they cannot answer without scheduling another call, you have learned something useful about how the next three years will go.

You may notice that every one of those is a question we answer on a public page. That is the entire point. None of them should require a meeting.

If you want the wider version of this, covering support, exit terms and how much you can configure yourself, we wrote a pre-purchase checklist for evaluating any ITSM platform.

What Publishing Costs Us

This is not free for us, and it would be dishonest to present it as pure principle. Publishing our pricing means we cannot quietly charge one company more than another for the same thing based on how much budget they appear to have. We cannot use "let us hop on a call and figure out what makes sense for you" to stall while we guess what a prospect might tolerate. Every customer sees the same rate card.

It also means any competitor can read our exact pricing any day, for free. We have made peace with that. We would rather win by being straightforward to deal with than by being hard to compare against.

Where Our Own Transparency Stops

Published pricing does not mean every deal is identical, and pretending otherwise would undercut the point. Enterprise carries a per-agent price on the page like every other tier, but the agreement around it does not. The term, the dedicated-infrastructure option and how it gets billed are settled in the contract, because a company running two thousand agents is negotiating something a fifteen-person IT team is not. Implementation is a published rate card rather than a single figure, so the arithmetic is public while your total depends on what you ask us to configure. Applications we have not shipped yet say "coming soon" instead of showing a number we would only have to revise. And we are pre-launch, so starting with us today still means getting in touch rather than entering a card.

What is different is where those conversations start. Nobody is negotiating from a position of total information asymmetry, because every per-agent rate is already public and you can check whether what you are being asked for is proportionate to it. A quote is far easier to judge when the rate card behind it is something you read before the call rather than something you are shown during it.

If You Are Sizing Us Up Right Now

You can find out in about thirty seconds whether we are in your range. Open the pricing page. Every plan, every add-on you can buy today, and every per-unit rate is there, with no form in front of it.

If the number does not work, you have spent thirty seconds instead of two weeks. If it does, the Pilot Program is the fastest way in: a flat, published fee by agent count for the bands most teams fall into, not a figure that moves depending on how the conversation goes. Past twenty-five agents it becomes a standard agreement rather than a pilot, and we say so on the page rather than leaving you to discover it on a call.

Either way, you will have the number before you have to talk to anyone. That is the only part of this we are really arguing for.