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Comment by qeorge | Hacker News Reader

The reverse. Offer a high price, but make it easy to get a discount (i.e., by contacting sales and asking for one, or Googling for a coupon).

Or offer an Enterprise plan and charge a ton for it.

You might be surprised. Some customers may actually prefer it if you charged more, and might not consider Tarsnap if you don't. (Enterprise software is "supposed to be" expensive).

At the very least its worth testing.

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Offering a dedicated Windows Server version might be one way of creating an "Enterprise" edition and charging a lot more for it.

This is an awesome idea. Do this.

I loathe companies that do this. It's deceptive and inefficient. Don't lie about your prices, and don't give breaks to people that intentionally cost you more by taking up the time of a sales agent.

I fail to see any deception. A company prefers to get price A for their services so they advertise price A. However, the people in charge would be willing to accept price B rather than lose the sale so price B is made available when price A won't cut it. You are offended by it because you are unwilling to negotiate and so these prices aren't available to you. If you don't ask, you'll never know the answer.

Inefficient? From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination

> The effects of price discrimination on social efficiency are unclear; typically such behavior leads to lower prices for some consumers and higher prices for others. Output can be expanded when price discrimination is very efficient, but output can also decline when discrimination is more effective at extracting surplus from high-valued users than expanding sales to low valued users. Even if output remains constant, price discrimination can reduce efficiency by misallocating output among consumers.

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