A Lack of Pricing Transparency
Why are prices actually hidden from potential customers?
We hope you’ve noticed that we’ve always been completely transparent on our product pricing, disclosing on every product page it’s price, as well as posting the price of all of our software on the Home page. We call that effort and the dozens of similar efforts our “open kimino” strategy to answer every question before it’s been asked.
One of our pet peeves is the secretive pricing in our document assembly & automaton industry, most egregiously by the oldest firm. We never did figure out its pricing system, but have certainly heard complaints over the years from all the customers that have moved over to TheFormTool and been full or praise for our approach.
We bring it up because of three coincidences.
First, about six weeks ago we were invited by a technology consultant to an emergency meeting with the management of a law firm. The consultant was fighting a fire after recommending that other firm to her client. In their pitch meeting, the price quoted was $35,000 per year, a surprise that threatened the ruin of the consultant’s relationship with her client. At her request we immediately met with management and quoted our price of less than $2,000. The consultant was a hero and her relationship is back on solid ground.
Second, a reader of “Artificial Intelligence’s View of Significant Firms in the Document Assembly and Automation Space”, asked for ChapGPT’s sources for the article. That stimulated our own curiosity, how did the AI monster beat our own research? Answer: it found a reference it at one of the several previous owners of the firm.
Finally, earlier this week a new customer went on at some length about the rapid and significant price increases he’df faced with the competitor. When he was presented with a new, more expensive contract, one that automatically added 12% per year to his future payments, he’d had enough.
Curious, we looked at the competitors site but couldn’t find any pricing anywhere; no pricing would be made available until a mandatory meeting with a salesperson. At TheFormTool we just can’t relate to that approach. We have no salespeople and rely for growth on our technical staff to answer questions from potential customers as well as word of mouth and the 4.8 rating from thousands existing customer firms in more than 80 countries.
For each of them, we’re grateful.
