The "Contact Sales" myth
Sales teams have argued for decades that hiding pricing protects margin and forces conversations. OpenView's annual SaaS pricing research now flatly disagrees. In their 2024 study of 700+ B2B SaaS companies, transparent pricing produced shorter sales cycles, higher win rates, and better-fit customers — across SMB, mid-market, AND enterprise tiers. The companies hiding price weren't filtering "tire-kickers"; they were repelling qualified buyers who chose a transparent competitor.
The only legitimate reason to hide pricing
Pricing genuinely varies by deployment scope (e.g., per-employee + per-integration + per-region), and any single number would mislead. Even then, publish a floor: "Plans from $40K/year for teams under 100." Procurement teams use the floor to short-list vendors before requesting proposals. Without a floor, you're cut from the consideration set early.
The AI-search angle
Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Claude all preferentially cite pages with explicit pricing when answering "how much does X cost" or "best X under $Y" queries. Pages with "Contact us for pricing" frequently get omitted entirely from these comparisons. As AI search captures more buyer-intent queries, hidden pricing becomes a measurable AEO disadvantage. Read our pricing page AI citation guide for what to publish and how to format it.