Strangely enough - as one who works in a midsized enterprise company, I think, sometimes, the approach is almost the opposite. When evaluating these services, a conversation like the following takes place:
IT Manager: "I'd like to start hosting our repositories on GitHub"
IT Director: "What's our CapEx/OpEx exposure, our 2011 non-headcount
Budget is getting capped at $12 million."
IT Manager:" Well, the Platinum Plan is $200/month."
IT Director: Stares for a second at the manager. "Why are you wasting my time.
Just put it on your P-Card and move on."
Seriously - I'm guessing many of of you don't have exposure to how much money all these thousands and thousands of companies pay for incredibly crappy software that does very little, but is the "Safe" Enterprise choice. If GitHub can win those accounts, great - but I'm dubious that at $200/month there is any cost review at all - they could increase their charges by 10x and _still_ not lose more than a couple of enterprise business deals on cost.
I sometimes wonder if Atlassian hurts itself by charging less than $100K for its products, and whether they would be able to pick up the large enterprise deals if they could figure out how to put together $800K RFPs. Their competition certainly does for software that is significantly inferior.
Re: Atlassian: putting together and pushing $800k RFPs through the sales cycle requires hiring sales people and is a distinctly different flavor of business from "monthly billing CC# of pseudo-anonymous customers we never met and at most talked with through email". The second is a favourite of engineer-founded modern startups. No messy customer relations to deal with outside of support contact, selling through data-driven conversion pipelines. Not one of the old-school golf-playing suit wearing dudes around. Basically a "by engineers for engineers" company. Note that I'm not deriding it, I'm just trying to capture its flavor.
I'm not sure about Atlassian, but I wouldn't be surprised if they're like that, given that they behave like one.
I sometimes wonder if Atlassian hurts itself by charging less than $100K for its products, and whether they would be able to pick up the large enterprise deals if they could figure out how to put together $800K RFPs. Their competition certainly does for software that is significantly inferior.