Why we publish our prices.

Open the website of almost any B2B software company that sells into museums and try to find out what the thing costs. You will fail. You'll find a "Request a demo" button, you'll find a glowing description of what the product does, and if you push past the marketing you will find some shaped-by-customer-success language about how "we'll work with you to find a plan that fits." What you will not find is a number.

This is the convention in the category. It is also the convention in most of B2B software, and there are real reasons for it, and I want to take those reasons seriously before I say why we decided not to follow them.

The convention, fairly stated

The vendor case for hidden pricing usually rests on three pillars.

The first is that pricing is genuinely custom. Different institutions have different needs — different sizes, different feature combinations, different language requirements, different deployment shapes — and a published price would either be misleading (because it implies a fit that doesn't exist) or wrong (because the real number depends on a conversation). This is the most honest version of the argument and it is sometimes true.

The second is that pricing is competitive intelligence. If a vendor publishes a number, every competitor sees it, and every prospect uses it as the floor. Vendors prefer to discover what a particular buyer is willing to pay, charge that, and not anchor the next buyer against it. This is price discrimination, and economists will tell you it is not inherently bad — it lets vendors serve a wider range of customers at the right price for each. It is also why airlines and SaaS companies both look the way they do.

The third reason is more practical. A sales call qualifies the buyer. It surfaces the actual need, ranks the urgency, and confirms there's a real procurement path. Vendors who price-publish often complain that they get more low-quality inbound — buyers who weren't really going to buy anything, who fill out the form because the number was on the page. The discovery call is a filter.

All three of those arguments are real. They explain why hidden pricing is the default, even at companies whose founders, if you asked them privately, would tell you they wish the industry didn't work this way.

What it costs the buyer

The trouble is that all three arguments are about what the vendor wants. None of them are about what the buyer needs.

What a museum buyer needs, before they pick up the phone, is the ability to do three things. They need to figure out whether the product is plausibly in their budget. They need to figure out whether the pricing model rewards or punishes the kind of usage they actually have. And they need to compare two or three vendors against each other on something other than vibes.

Hidden pricing makes all three harder. It forces the buyer to spend a discovery call just to find out whether the rest of the procurement process is worth opening at all. It makes vendor comparison a game of triangulation — you talk to three vendors, you collect three numbers, you try to figure out which one was a sandbagged anchor and which one was the real ask. And it punishes the buyer who has the smallest procurement team to absorb that overhead.

In a museum context, the overhead is real. Most institutions don't have a procurement officer whose job is to do vendor calls. The people who run that process are usually the head of visitor experience, or the executive director, or the chief curator — people whose calendars are already full of the actual work of running a museum. Asking them to spend a 30-minute call to find out what a thing costs, before they've decided it's even worth a 30-minute call, is asking them to pay a tax. The vendors who do this know they're asking. They've done the math; they've decided the qualified inbound is worth the friction.

What it costs a small museum specifically

This is the part I think the category gets the most wrong, and the part that decided it for us.

The institutions most likely to give up after the first hidden-pricing wall are the ones with the smallest staff. A four-person regional historical society does not have an afternoon to spend on three discovery calls. They will look at the website, see the Request a demo button, conclude they can't tell if this is a $200/year tool or a $20,000/year tool, and move on. The vendor never knows they were there.

The institutions least bothered by hidden pricing are the large ones. A university museum with a procurement department is going to do the discovery call regardless. They have time for it. They have a process for it. They are the buyer the vendor is set up to serve, and the vendor is, in effect, only set up to serve buyers like them.

What the convention quietly does is select the audience down to people who can afford to be sold to. The argument that this is fine because "we want to focus on the qualified buyer" is true as far as it goes. It is also exactly the kind of thing you say when you've decided to not serve a market you said you were going to serve.

We say that Convo is for museums and cultural institutions of every size, including the small ones, including the ones with limited procurement budgets, including the ones where the head of visitor experience is also the head of education. If that's true, then a website that asks every one of those buyers to book a call to find out what it costs is, structurally, a wall.

So we tore the wall down. The numbers are on the pricing page. Pilot is free. Studio is $1,200 a month. Institution is $3,500. Enterprise is custom because configuration genuinely is custom and we'll say more about that in a minute. There is no version of this conversation where, after the discovery call, a small museum finds out the real price is double what they expected. The price is the price.

The strongest objection — and what we still do behind the line

The most honest version of the hidden-pricing argument is that pricing actually is custom, and any published number is going to mislead some segment of buyers.

I take this seriously, because it's true at the top of our pricing scale. Enterprise deployments at Convo really are custom — the configuration depends on language counts, integration requirements, white-label scope, contractual specifics, security review depth. We don't publish an Enterprise number not because we're sandbagging, but because there isn't one number that would tell you what your Enterprise contract would cost. The right thing to do there is to talk.

But the top of the scale isn't where most buyers are. The vast majority of institutions we talk with land cleanly inside one of the three published tiers — Pilot, Studio, Institution — and for those buyers, the discovery call would be a costume drama. The number we'd give on the call is the number on the page. We may as well save everyone the calendar invite.

What we still do behind the line is the part the discovery call was supposedly for: figuring out whether you're a fit. The pricing page tells you what it costs; it doesn't tell you whether it's right for you. That decision is what the pilot is for. The Pilot tier is free, has no time limit, and lets a museum publish one complete tour against their own materials. That's the actual qualification step. The price was never the qualification step; that was always a vendor convenience.

What we give up

Honest piece of the argument: by publishing, we give up the ability to discover what a particular buyer would have paid.

This matters less than people think. Most B2B SaaS price-discrimination is theater — every vendor has a notional "list price" that hardly anyone pays, and a sales motion designed to discover the discount the buyer was always going to get. The actual price range is much narrower than the secrecy implies. Publishing collapses the theater. We give up the upside of the buyer who would have paid more, and we give up the downside of the buyer we would have undersold. In the long run, neither one was a real number.

What we do give up that's harder to recover is our ability to react to competitor pricing in real time. A vendor whose prices are private can match a competitor's quote on a specific deal without anyone else noticing. A vendor whose prices are public can't. We've decided we'd rather compete on the product than on per-deal discounting. The numbers on the page are the numbers.

Why we still publish

I want to be careful not to overclaim virtue here. We didn't publish our prices because we are unusually principled. We did it because the convention costs us the smallest museums and our entire thesis is that the smallest museums are exactly who should be served by a category that's historically left them out.

There's a secondary reason worth naming. When a buyer reads pricing-side material that mentions specific dollar numbers, that material outranks an equivalent piece of marketing without numbers — in search, in citation, in the procurement spreadsheet a curator pastes into a board memo. A category where every vendor hides the number leaves a vacuum, and the publisher fills it. Honesty in pricing turns out to be aligned with the way the modern web actually works.

But the core reason is the small museum thing. If a regional historical society visits convo.app at 11pm because the executive director is finally doing the audio-guide research after a board meeting, the number is on the page. They can decide in five minutes whether to take this further. They don't have to book a call with someone they don't know to find out whether they were even in the right room.

That's the part of the convention I never want us to slip back into. The price is on the page because we want to be findable to the buyer who can't afford to book a call to find us.

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About the author

Eric Duffy is the founder of Convo, a platform that helps museums and cultural institutions publish multilingual audio tours their visitors can have a conversation with. He writes about the economics of museum interpretation from inside the category. Reach him at eric@convo.app or on LinkedIn.