As someone that often has limited time to research viable options to present to leadership, I expect to be able to negotiate pricing at the enterprise level if we want to move forward. What's deeply frustrating that keeps me from sometimes mentioning an option is having no idea what the rough order of magnitude pricing is. Some kind of pricing is deeply appreciated.
If I don't know whether something will fit within the approximate budget for the project and can't quickly get an idea from other research I'm not going to mention it as an option. I'm used to spending about a million per rack but that's for a complete ESX cluster with storage and networking, if I have no idea how alternatives stack up against that it's hard to put it on the table.
You are right that this sort of sales style has its downsides. I am also not saying there's no value in having something on the page, or that Oxide is always going to be this way. I am just talking about why it is a norm in many parts of the B2B world.
I will echo this. A product with no pricing information will often just get no further exploration, especially if a competitor does have it. Don't underestimate the overhead of just having to talk sales before you have a price.
I’m surprised there is anything that you can spend a million dollars on where nearly all the alternatives aren’t “please contact sales”. And even if there was, you couldn’t do any real analysis without contacting sales, because any displayed price would be highly negotiable.
Where I’m frustrated by this attitude is when I just want to buy 10 seats of something and it doesn’t have a price, not at the seven digit level.