This is what I meant in my comment. The seller needs to know what the buyer wants, maybe its a big bulk discount or an extra feature. If the seller decides the discount is too steep, or the extra feature doesn't fit with the road map, then no deal. Or maybe the deal really is that big, and it's worth catering to some one-off demands.

None of this means "hiding" information, but you can't put something like "We'll do X hrs of extra work if you buy Y licenses". Just like the any store might have a 10% discount if you buy a dozen, but if you want 50,000 then there will probably be a conversation involved.

> for everyone

YES!

Adding features just for single customers doesn't scale, adding features useful to many customers does.

From the other side, have you ever tried to deal with corporate customers with SSO?

What normally happens: * Enterprise customer's CIO/Legal/Security team demands SSO.

* You are put in touch with some support guy in India in IT

* He doesn't know so has to go out to some external consultancy to work with whatever hell they've layered on top of Entra ID

* You end up getting sent a SAML configuration

* Said SAML configuration doesn't work for some reason so you reach out again.

* You wait for a response for a month

* The people who actually want to use the product are getting annoyed

* Somehow an exception is made, so user accounts get created, people start using the product.

* 6 months later the exception is up, you've still not heard from their IT team despite badgering them.

* Suddenly their IT team gets into gear, it all gets set up and is working.

* Two years later, the SAML configuration is due to expire. You reach out to the customer contact and the whole game starts all over again because of course all the people you previously spoke to have left.

Right. The scenario you describe is reasonable. But as a buyer, if you put out those few pricing options, even if none of them match all my needs, I get to see both the features you offer and the prices you ask, which gives me the two critical pieces of information I seek: whether you have the capability to satisfy some or all my needs, and what order of magnitude we talk about in terms of costs. If that information tells me that you might have something for us, and it might fit in our budget, then I'll be more than happy to call you, and spend whatever time is needed to agree on a set of features and a price that works for both of us.

The thing I want to desperately avoid is wasting time dancing around the salesmen trying to overhype their product while staying vague on the details, in hopes to get me to buy (and pay as much as I can) regardless of whether I get any value from it.

There's a theory an economics that says that the more different prices a provider can charge the more of the surplus they capture (ie they can tilt that percentage towards the seller and away from the buyer).

Of course, if they're a monopoly provider and the buyer really needs it, they have to cough up. But generally there are substitute products. So the buyer would do well to look for an alternative that doesn't do differential pricing to capture more surplus for themselves.

> And what precisely is the problem? Obviously, we have incomplete information, but in efficient markets ALL providers all trying to capture the full value of the solution they provide.

Because:

1) In efficient markets, all users also try to capture full value they get from the they bought. Efficient competition is purely adversarial.

2) You say, "As long as that number is 99.99% (...) it's still valuable for BOTH parties". Unfortunately, incomplete information and information asymmetry makes it more than likely that the "is trying to align their pricing" so that this number is more than 100%. That is, if you're not careful, they'll scam you.

The two above are arguments why this is a problem for the buyer, in practice. The next one is more general:

3) Everything that's good and nice and human happens inside economic inefficiencies. For human beings, a truly efficient market is a literal definition of hell - everyone's suffering as much as possible, spending all their energy to earn exactly enough to barely survive.

> FWIW most SaaS businesses severely underprice their offering relative to the economic value they create.

As it should be.

I'll say here what I say to people who talk about stopping to post anything publicly, lest it ends up in LLM training data:

Trying to capture for yourself 100% of the economic value you're producing is an extreme form of greed. When companies try to do that, they get called evil and used as examples of everything that's wrong with late-stage capitalism and such. Human society works best when people don't capture all their productive output, when they actually do leave some money on the table, because this allows others to take it and use it to innovate and create more value - which, again, if they don't capture entirety of it, allows even more people to build on top of it.

All of us who produce, we also consume. Society and its markets form an ecosystem, which needs some inefficiency to evolve, be resilient and thrive.

(See also: running any system at 100% capacity is "efficient" up until some random event causes the load to grow ever so slightly, even for a tiny moment, at which point the system suffers a cascade of failures and dies.)