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You can fix this with licensing, as many products do inversely: they have a free educational / nonprofit / noncommercial version (e.g. many CAD programs in the past) and if you don't fall in the carveouts, you must pay $$$$$.

Also some forms of libraries and game engines ask that you pay $X per year if you earn more than $Y per year, including the reviled changes to the Unity license, as does Apple given the app store have a lower tier theoretically for smaller businesses.

I've done this in the past for people - same product, but "Certified HIPAA Compliant" or what have you, even when the base level is already HIPAA compliant. But we won't sign a BAA for you unless you cough up or demonstrate need.

You can do this with this kind of tool by offering a tier for private citizens, and a tier for governmental agencies. Or even rebrand with a separate tool: GovCloud, for example.

> they have a free educational / nonprofit / noncommercial version (e.g. many CAD programs in the past) and if you don't fall in the carveouts, you must pay $$$$$.

> Also some forms of libraries and game engines ask that you pay $X per year if you earn more than $Y per year, including the reviled changes to the Unity license, as does Apple given the app store have a lower tier theoretically for smaller businesses

Is it common for companies to try to find workarounds to stay on lower tiers (e.g. signing up on a personal email but using it for company work), especially when you can't verify which tier they should be on? I've rarely seen pricing tiers like this in smaller SaaS products for example and I'm curious how well they'd work.

I've had product ideas where I'd be happy to give it away for free to people that can't afford it but then I can't see a simple way to check this. You see "email us to use for free if you can't afford it" sometimes.

The bigger the org, the more risk averse wrt legal issues like this generally

The $1.99/mo is presumably per user; how many users are said hospitals/institutions paying for? I'd have assumed they'd be looking for a _discount_ on the website price tbh.

In the context of assistive technologies used to people recovering from TBIs, our tool is very inexpensive.

They typically are looking to cover dozens, not hundreds/thousands of users. If that were the case we could offer a discount on ongoing usage, as long as they covered the one-time cost of contract review.

Aren't they just lying to you? No law prevents you from setting terms and prices for different sets of features and services nor forbids them from paying market price.

They aren't paying above market they are simply being billed for the actual terms and features they are demanding.

I don't know if they're strictly lying, but they sure aren't recognizing that going through all their legal documents requires thousands of dollars of contract review.

Wellcome to the world of B2B. Or any purchase involving larger ammounts of money. Buying real estate without having a lawyer reading the sales contract is just stupid.

And usually those fees are close to negliable, should be considered in pricing as part of the overhead and are simply cost of doing business.

Good news, if you are already at the point your customer provided paper worl to be reviewed, you are pretty advanced in the sales process with a decent chance of making the sale.

It doesn't have to be about law, the person in charge of purchasing the service may be bound by rules internal to their administration, such as "you have to pick the cheapest option that fills the requirements".

The cheapest option that meets the requirements is institutional pricing.

>No law prevents you from setting terms and prices for different sets of features and services nor forbids them from paying market price.

There are laws (in some places) that prevent you from charging the government more for a product than you charge another customer. So you'd really want another SKU for a higher price tier to make it definitively a separate product rather then just telling them they'll need to pay more if they ask for something.

> these entities wish to have us comb through dozens of pages of legal agreements

what a shame! make the "comb through legal agreements" plan 60k ACV?

Who'd have thought real-world B2B sales require more than a credit card and a subscription link? Like, contracts, paper work, audits and lawyers? This is outrageous!