Show HN: We built PriceLevel to find out what companies pay for SaaS

Overall Reception & Value

• Many commenters love the concept: “Glassdoor/levels.fyi for SaaS pricing,” filling a painful gap in opaque enterprise pricing.
• Buyers want quick ballpark figures (e.g., is it $3k vs $90k vs $200k) without entering sales funnels.
• Smaller SaaS providers see it as a way to understand typical enterprise deal sizes.
• Some argue $500/year pricing invites competitors to undercut with similar services.

Privacy, Anonymity & Data Fuzzing

• Strong concern that precise prices and seat counts can uniquely identify specific customers.
• Multiple suggestions:
  • Round to 2 significant digits or nearest thousand/hundred.
  • Show price/seat count ranges or percentage intervals (e.g., ±5%).
  • Aggregate/faceted views with error bars once enough data exists.
  • Fuzz attributes like geography, contract length, and company size.
• The team reports implementing rounding and adding geography, plus normalizing to annual pricing.

Legal & Trade-Secret Debates

• Long, conflicted discussion on whether pricing can be a trade secret.
  • Some point to case law and say price lists and pricing strategies can be trade secrets, especially under NDA/confidentiality clauses.
  • Others argue that what a customer paid is their own information, not the vendor’s secret, and that enforcing secrecy on prices is anti-competitive and contrary to efficient markets.
• Many note that SaaS contracts often include confidentiality around pricing.
• Ideas for risk mitigation: aggregate data, delete contributor PII, disclaim that contributors must have rights to share.
• Unclear consensus; several emphasize the operator should get legal counsel.

Data Quality, Manipulation & Verification

• Concern about fake or adversarial entries (e.g., inflating competitors’ prices).
• Proposed mitigations:
  • Require documentation (quotes, invoices, contracts).
  • Use company email; ban accounts submitting bad data.
  • Use medians/outlier filtering.
  • Allow vendors to respond or flag entries.
• Some note that sharing internal documents may violate corporate rules.

Product Design & Scope Feedback

• Need clarity on units: per year vs per month, per contract vs per seat; the site later normalizes to annual.
• Requests for more dimensions: region, contract length, feature tiers, seat counts, and global coverage.
• Recognition that bespoke enterprise deals (custom features, SLAs, support) limit comparability and may explain wide price spread.