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- "Dont Hide Prices".
Opinion
Why Companies Hide Pricing — and Why It’s a Problem
The Problem With Hiding Pricing
I’ve been researching live streaming platforms lately as part of my ongoing effort to build community with artists. My goal is to make Pedestal one of the central pillars in their creative careers—something that encourages art, discussion, and innovation, not just another platform chasing streaming metrics.
StreamYard was one of the first platforms I looked at. From a design perspective, it checks a lot of boxes: you can customize the branding, add your own logo, and integrate slides seamlessly. It’s also known for being easy to use.
But when I went to look up pricing (on the websites pricing page), I hit a wall. The numbers were hidden. You can’t see them unless you sign up for a seven-day free trial.
That’s annoying on several levels. For one, it doesn’t actually hide anything—anyone curious enough can open another tab and learn that StreamYard’s pricing recently jumped from $25 to $44 a month. But the bigger question is why hide it in the first place?
Transparency Builds Trust
People will always find out what your product costs. When they do, they’ll either respect your transparency or feel misled. For enterprise clients, custom pricing makes sense. But for everyday creators and hobbyists, hiding basic subscription information feels unnecessary and manipulative.
Let’s be real—$44 a month isn’t a casual expense for most independent creators. That’s fine if StreamYard wants to cater to professionals or larger brands. Every product has its lane. Louis Vuitton doesn’t apologize for selling $1,000 handbags when others sell similar ones for $200. The difference is that Louis Vuitton doesn’t make you sign up for a newsletter before revealing the price.
If you believe in your brand, stand by it—pricing included.
The Bigger Picture
This kind of strategy—where companies hide pricing or keep it vague—isn’t new. It’s part of a larger playbook often used by VC-backed tech companies: underprice early to build market share, then raise prices once they’ve cornered the market. I call it the ”growth at all cost play”.
We’ve seen it with Microsoft’s Game Pass, Netflix, Spotify, and even with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Companies will start out with accessible pricing, then quietly shifted their pricing once they became indispensable.
What Pedestal Believes
At Pedestal, we take the opposite approach. We believe in transparency—about pricing, ownership, and value. Our customers deserve to know what they’re paying for. Our goal isn’t to trap anyone in an ecosystem; it’s to create one worth belonging to.
If you can’t stand by your price, maybe the issue isn’t your customers—it’s your product.
