That’s exactly it.

We have found that a lot of the thinking behind locking feature flags behind enterprise pricing is that there’s a perception that providing those features always comes with an increased support load. Or that you only need these features if you have lots of money to spend anyway. Neither have proven true for us.

Sometimes enterprise pricing is to offset the costs of and somewhat conceal that lack of focus on those features. It’s exceedingly ridiculous in 2024, for example, to have to email a support contact the SAML certificate to setup SSO. (In our case, we run away from those kinds of providers anyway.)

In direct reply to u/contrast: Of course there are some areas where we purchase the enterprise option because it’s the only thing available (our ERP for example), but that’s becoming rarer than it used to be. Where it becomes a deal breaker we usually find that the competition is happy to have us. Alternatively we make our own solution variously on platform agnostic primitives like S3 (or S3 API-compatible options), as a custom app in our ERP, or by using (and/or sponsoring) FOSS upstreams for commercialized source-available products. Being a customer that typically doesn’t need to talk to sales or support seems to make us a more profitable customer, and there can sometimes be room to negotiate there.

Edit to add: We don’t necessarily position ourselves as an enterprise grade provider. We tend to avoid engagements like that purposefully. Rather, we position ourselves as a trustworthy provider that takes their work seriously. We don’t find enterprise branding particularly helpful, and we aren’t oriented toward a sales culture or pushing to grow the business every single quarter. We prefer to simply do a good job and earn the trust our customers place in us. That does mean we need to operate with an enterprise grade focus in some areas, but that doesn’t mean we can or want to pay enterprise grade prices for every single thing we need.

We target mainly small businesses. Many of our customers want something different than what is frequently not-even-bargain-basement service that they had before. For example, we manage many customer domain names. Many of our customers have been burned in the past by web designer sole-props saying “yes” to any business that comes at them, but forgetting or not knowing to do things like annual WHOIS contact reviews, properly offboarding resold accounts, not implementing strong MFA, staying on top things like the recent DMARC changes, etc. These businesses deserve top notch service just as much as an enterprise, so we strive to do that for them. Unfortunately rendering that service frequently requires tools or features presumed to be desired or needed only by large enterprises.