Why there is no pricing page, and why the comparison tables say so

Most pre-launch sites in our market have a pricing page. Several of the ten we studied publish detailed tiers for a product you cannot buy yet.

We do not, and the reason is boring: we have not decided.

The temptation is specific

It is not really a temptation to invent prices. It is a temptation to invent a shape. Three tiers, the middle one highlighted, enterprise on request. You can build that page without committing to a number, it makes the company look further along than it is, and every competitor’s page gives you a template.

The problem shows up one layer down, in the comparison tables.

A comparison page has a pricing row. If we have no pricing, that row is a gap, and a gap in a table looks like an oversight. The pressure is to put something there: “from $X”, or “competitive”, or a range. Each of those is a claim about a product that does not have a price, published alongside real, dated, sourced claims about competitors’ prices.

That is the actual risk. Not that a made-up number misleads someone into a purchase they cannot make, but that it sits in a table that is otherwise true and quietly makes the whole table untrustworthy.

How we stopped ourselves

There is a single source of truth for our own commercial position, and the pricing model is literally the string unpublished. Comparison tables read it and render an explicit cell saying pricing is not yet published.

It is one line of configuration, and it means no template can accidentally produce a number. Changing it is a commit, with a diff, which is the right amount of friction for a decision of that size.

The site’s own metadata carries the same flag, with a comment that says pre-launch, there is no pricing, and we must not imply one.

What we tell people instead

The demo request form does not ask for budget, company size or timeline, because we would only be asking to qualify people and we are not qualifying anyone yet. We are taking a small number of teams, walking through the product on their own software, and using what they say to decide what this is worth.

When someone asks what it will cost, the honest answer is that we do not know, that they will see plans before anyone is asked to pay, and that the teams we are talking to now are part of how the number gets decided.

That answer costs us some people, and it is the only answer we have that is true.

The general rule

The rule this comes from applies well beyond pricing, and it is the one we keep returning to: do not publish a plausible value where you have no value.

A plausible value is worse than a blank, because a blank is legible as missing and a plausible value is not. It propagates. Someone builds a comparison on it, a table inherits it, and six months later nobody remembers which numbers were real.

We have a field type that carries a source, a date and a confidence level on every fact for exactly this reason. A number with no provenance cannot be stored, which means it cannot be rendered, which means nobody has to remember the rule.