I had the same experience some years ago. When we told them they were out of their minds and they wouldn't budge on price, the sales rep came back after a few months pleading to get us back to the table because we would have been a gigantic sale and a foothold into the other orgs of the large company I worked for at the time. We told them we already had a different solution in flight because of their original failure to negotiate.
Thirded. Some of their products looked useful so we talked to a sales person, and it was exorbitant. Not "oof, that's a little more than I'd budgeted for", but "LOL does that include equity?" The upside is that it pushed us to check out the alternatives.
AWS Secrets Manager isn't as nice as Vault in a lot of ways, but at a starting price of $0.40/mo for 1 secret + as many clients as you'd want vs $1250/mo for a standard vault + 1 client, it's fine.
I worked in the HashiCorp sales org for a couple of years -- Vault's weird identity-based pricing model was by far the biggest issue with getting prospects to buy Enterprise. It's great if you're a large multinational with highly-consolidated infrastructure and application identity, but if you're operating on a smaller scale than that or are not highly-centralized it's totally infeasible. The sales segment that focused on the smallest deals was rarely able to sell Vault Enterprise at all -- both because the pricing was so high and because the pricing model itself didn't scale in a way prospects felt they could understand and budget predictably for as they grew. We heard "we love the features, but there's no way we can afford that price" all the time. Various people beat the drum on this internally for literally years right from the initial switch to the current pricing model, but other than minor "client counting" tweaks, nothing ever changed.
I see they have a SaaS product called Vault Secrets now and I bet that's exactly why that product exists.
