Add to this: transparent pricing. Most developers I know are highly allergic to "Call for a quote!"

For enterprise pricing, this can be unavoidable, but a ballpark is nice. Or say you can offer steep discounts in the right situation, and have me call to discuss.

nobody would be allergic to calling for a quote if calling got you a quote. problem is, it puts you in a pipeline/funnel and you still don't have a quote.

Transparent pricing and a free/evaluation tier that is feature complete but scale limited, rather than feature-gated. With that combination I can put together a really tiny "this can do X for us and would cost us Y at our current scale, potentially negotiable" demonstration, which will make the CTO sit up and listen. Without transparent pricing I'm just not going to bother (because it's the first question I'll be asked) and if you gate off enterprise features I can't demonstrate enterprise use cases.

I don't even need the quote to be perfect, but giving me a rough order of magnitude will let me and the provider not waste each other's time.

Holy hell this.

If more software companies put effort in documentation, web environments in the browser were is it possible to try the tools, provide many and good examples they would instantly push themselves way ahead of the competition.

Amen to good documentation.

Thats one of the biggest reasons to use open source these days. Most paid products have aweful documentation.

If you want me to use your product i need to be able to onboard myself.

* aweful *

you made my day :)