The Quote-Only Economy 2026
Contact sales is still a price. It usually means six figures, a multi-year term, or both. 67 of 482 tracked products publish no usable price at all, and another 215 hide their top tier. This report maps where pricing disappears and uses marketplace listings to put real dollar floors under the silence.
Key findings, July 2, 2026
- 14% of tracked products (67 of 482) publish no price on any tier. Another 45% price the entry tiers and hide the top one.
- Hidden pricing concentrates in five markets: LLM platforms, compliance, ERP, data observability and endpoint security.
- Cloud-marketplace listings expose the floors: Alation from $60,000/yr, Atlan from $100,000/yr, Collibra from $120,000/yr.
- Security pricing also hides behind contract terms: the Wiz Go bundle is $222,000 for 36 months, a term total that reads like an annual price.
- The practical floor of the quote-only market is roughly $25,000 a year. Below that budget, the sales motion does not want you.
Fully hidden
67
14% of 482 products
Top tier hidden
215
45% price entry, hide the rest
Any hidden tier
59%
of the tracked market
Highest floor found
$295k
Collibra Ultimate, per year
Where pricing goes dark
Products with no published price on any tier, by category.
| Category | Fully quote-only products |
|---|---|
| Large Language Models | 9 |
| ERP Software | 7 |
| FinOps & Cloud Cost | 6 |
| Payments & Billing | 5 |
| Crypto Exchanges | 4 |
| Cloud Hosting | 3 |
| Compliance Automation | 3 |
| Endpoint Security (XDR/EDR) | 3 |
| AI Agents | 2 |
| Crypto Wallets | 2 |
The floors under the silence
Vendors that sell through cloud marketplaces have to list something. These are published contract floors, not quotes, and each links to the product page where we document the full cost picture.
Alation
marketplace starting floor, contracts grow with scope
Atlan
marketplace starting floor above a ~5-user free tier
Collibra
three marketplace tiers, Standard to Ultimate
Orca Security
priced by workload band, custom past the top band
Wiz
Go bundle term total; the full platform is quote-only
Ping Identity
customer-identity tiers, published as annual contracts
Reading the quote-only market
The categories in the table share one trait: the buyer is an organisation, never a person. Nobody swipes a card for a data catalog or an ERP. Once the buyer is a procurement process, a public price only limits what sales can charge, so the price leaves the page. It is rational vendor behaviour. It just happens to transfer the cost of price discovery onto you.
Marketplace listings broke this pattern half-open. A vendor that wants AWS or Azure budget flowing through co-sell deals must publish contract entries, and those entries are the most honest numbers in enterprise software. That is how we know Collibra spans $120,000 to $295,000 a year, and that Atlan's free tier gives way to a six-figure contract. The gap between a free tier for five users and a $100,000 annual bill, with nothing in between, is the quote-only economy in one picture.
Watch the units, because they are where the surprises live. Orca prices by workload band, so growth in your cloud estate reprices the contract without any negotiation. Wiz publishes a number that looks annual and is a 36-month total. Sysdig's honest-looking $72 per host carries a 20-host minimum. None of this is on a rate card; all of it is in marketplace listings and terms, which is where we pull it from.
Our advice is unglamorous. Before booking any demo, check whether the vendor lists on a cloud marketplace and read the floor. If the floor is triple your budget, you saved yourself three discovery calls. If a competitor publishes prices in the same category, start there instead: a vendor confident enough to show a number is telling you something about how they negotiate.
Questions buyers ask
How common is quote-only pricing in enterprise SaaS?
Across 482 tracked products, 67 (14%) publish no usable price at all, and another 215 (45%) publish entry tiers but hide the top one behind sales. Combined, 59% of products have at least one tier you cannot price without a call.
What does contact-sales pricing actually cost?
Cloud-marketplace listings give the honest lower bound, because vendors must publish something to sell through AWS or Azure. Data catalogs start at $60,000 to $170,000 a year. Cloud security runs $84,000 to $360,000 a year depending on workload count. If your budget is five figures, most of the quote-only market is not for you, and that is worth knowing before the demo.
Why do vendors hide pricing?
Price discrimination, in the neutral economic sense. A quote lets the vendor charge each buyer close to their willingness to pay, anchored to headcount, cloud bill or breach risk rather than a rate card. It also keeps competitors from undercutting a published number. The cost falls on you: weeks of discovery calls to learn a number a marketplace listing states upfront.
How do you find the real price before talking to sales?
Three sources, in order of reliability: cloud marketplace listings (AWS, Azure, GCP publish real contract floors), procurement-data services that aggregate actual paid contracts, and buyer-reported quotes on public forums. We fold all three into the product pages where available, labelled by source.
Related reports
Methodology
Fully quote-only = no plan on the product publishes a positive monthly or annual rate, and at least one non-free tier requires contacting sales. Partially hidden = at least one priced tier plus at least one unpriced non-free tier. Counts compute from the dataset at build time, as of July 2, 2026. Contract floors come from public cloud-marketplace listings and vendor terms, documented per product; buyer-reported quotes are labelled as reports, not list prices. Full methodology.