Self-serve checkout is the transparency forcing function
Price transparency in this corpus is set by whether a self-serve purchase path exists, not by whether a sales team exists — 208 of 308 sales-led companies publish prices (68%, against a 71% corpus base), while removing the self-serve/PLG path drops publication to 3 of 73 (4%). The enabler is mechanical: a checkout cannot take money without a number on the page, which puts this closer to a definition than to a discovery. What keeps it empirical is that 3 companies in 353 publish a rate card they refuse to sell self-serve; the boundary condition is that price_transparency is a single-valued field on multi-product companies, so the 4 apparent reverse cases are product-line splits rather than counterevidence.
Evidence over time
13 supporting · 6 counter — hover or tap a point for detail, click to jump to the row.
Evidence
| Company | Date | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| Harvey | May 2026 | Gated enterprise per-seat pricing, sales-led quote only. sales_motion is [sales-led] with no self-serve or PLG tag and no free tier — one of the 70 companies in the sales-led-ONLY-and-opaque cell. |
| Glean | Jul 2026 | Gated hybrid — per-user seats plus pooled FlexCredits, or seats plus per-token Model Hub usage. Three pricing-model tags and two live meters, none of them priced on the page; no self-serve path, no free tier. |
| Gong | Jun 2026 | Per-user licences plus a platform fee scaled to supported users, quote-only. A horizontal-SaaS incumbent in a segment where 91% of companies bill seats — and no seat price is published, because there is nowhere to buy one. |
| Ada | Jun 2026 | Outcome-based per-resolution billing, sales-quoted, no public price (third-party data puts the rate near $1.00-$3.50 per resolution). sales-led only; no sign-up flow exists to price against. |
| Sierra | Jul 2026 | Outcome-based pay-per-resolution plus volume pricing for routine interactions, sales-only/custom. Tagged outcome-based, pure-usage and hybrid simultaneously with no published number on any of the three. |
| Mercor | Jul 2026 | Sales-quoted marketplace: the buyer-side take-rate is undisclosed while the supply-side hourly expert pay is published. Opacity is one-sided — the price the platform charges has no self-serve path, so it has no published number. |
| Skydio | Jun 2026 | No first-party rate card at all: X10/X10D hardware plus per-drone software subscriptions (Skydio Care, Remote Ops, Cloud) are quoted via sales or GSA. Reseller and government-schedule prices exist publicly; Skydio publishes none directly. |
| Orb | Jun 2026 | Gated sales-led custom pricing on billings plus events usage, with a platform fee on higher tiers — a usage-based billing vendor with no self-serve tier and therefore no published rate. |
| m3ter | Jul 2026 | Gated hybrid: a core platform fee bundling usage-data and bill-calculation allowances, plus add-ons, support and implementation. Metering-infrastructure vendor, no sign-up flow, no published price. |
| ZoomInfo | Jul 2026 | Seat plus credit-pool pricing, quote-only and gated, with commits — a NASDAQ-listed company with a fully documented three-part meter and no self-serve purchase path, so no number reaches the page. |
| Lorikeet | Jul 2026 | WRONG-SIDE CASE. Publishes Start $1,500/mo and Scale $4,000/mo on annual per-resolution credit pools, yet sales_motion is [sales-led] only: the 2024 tiers had a pay-by-card 'Get started' checkout and by May 2025 every tier routed to 'Book a demo'. The price outlived the checkout — direct proof the two fields are coded independently. |
| Regie.ai | Jun 2026 | WRONG-SIDE CASE. Publishes AI SEP at $180/user/mo and Force Multiplier Rep at $499/user/mo with bundled AI/enrichment credits, on annual contracts with no self-serve checkout — a public rate card sold entirely through a rep. |
| Tabnine | Jun 2026 | WRONG-SIDE CASE. Publishes Code Assistant Platform $39/user/mo and Agentic Platform $59/user/mo, plus a capacity-tiered headless add-on, but both are annual subscriptions quoted via sales and the free tier was retired in 2024 — published price, no purchase path. |
Counterexamples
- Automation Anywhere · Jul 2026 — Tagged sales_motion [self-serve, sales-led] and has_free_tier true, yet price_transparency sales-only — because the self-serve half IS the free Community Edition and every paid Automation 360 edition is quoted by bots, seats and cloud consumption. A product-line split, not a vendor that sells paid plans self-serve without publishing a price.
- Sana AI · Jun 2026 — Same split, and the file states it outright: Sana Agents has a public rate card (Free / $30 per user/mo Team / custom Enterprise) while Sana Learn is quote-only with a 300-seat minimum. price_transparency is single-valued, so the enterprise line sets the tag and the self-serve line is invisible to it.
- Unbabel · Jun 2026 — Core LangOps translation is sales-led and quote-only; its Widn.ai self-serve product runs free to $90/mo. Two motions, two transparency states, one field — the tag records the enterprise surface.
- Clockwise · Jun 2026 — A dead-surface artefact rather than a live exception: the product was switched off 2026-03-27 after Salesforce acqui-hired the team, so the live site has no prices. Its historical self-serve ladder (Free / Teams $6.75 / Business $11.50 per user/mo) is reconstructable only from Wayback.
- Lago · Jul 2026 — The cleanest live bound on the claim: open-core usage-based billing with a genuine self-serve on-ramp (free self-hosted, has_free_tier true) and sales_motion [self-serve, sales-led], yet the one paid package — Lago Premium — carries no published price, so transparency is gated. A free self-serve path forces a $0, not a rate card.
- Maxio · Jun 2026 — Publishes Grow at $599/mo for up to $100k in monthly billings and a free Build developer sandbox, then makes Scale quote-only above $100k billings — self-serve plus sales-led, coded gated. The checkout forces a number only for the band it can transact.
Trivia
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Exactly 3 companies in 353 publish a price they will not let you buy: Lorikeet (Start $1,500/mo, Scale $4,000/mo, verified 2026-07-21), Regie.ai ($180 and $499 per user/mo, 2026-06-05) and Tabnine ($39 and $59 per user/mo, 2026-06-09). Lorikeet's own page history records the move that created the mismatch: its 2024 tiers carried a pay-by-card "Get started" click-through, and by May 2025 every tier routed to "Book a demo" — the checkout was removed and the numbers were left behind.
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Two of the ten opaque vendors sampled here sell usage-based billing and metering infrastructure and will not publish their own price: Orb (gated, verified 2026-06-03) and m3ter (gated, 2026-07-21). Both sit in the 70-company sales-led-ONLY cohort, and both sell the tooling that makes a published usage rate card operable for someone else.
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Skydio (verified 2026-06-14) shows opacity is a property of the vendor's own surface rather than of the market: reseller and GSA government-schedule prices for its X10 drones and per-drone software subscriptions do exist in public, and Skydio publishes none of them directly. The number is knowable — just not from the company that sets it.