Pricing
Should you put your prices on your website?
The honest case both ways — and a middle path that filters out tire-kickers without scaring off the customers you actually want.
There’s no single right answer
Smart businesses go both ways.
This is one of those questions where confident people will tell you opposite things and both are right — because the answer depends on what you sell, not on a rule. It’s one of a handful of small “should I put this on my site?” calls every business makes; the closest cousin is whether to put your phone number and email on your website, which has its own trade-offs.
It’s worth deciding on purpose rather than by default. Showing prices and hiding them each solve a real problem and each create one — so the useful move is to know which problem is yours. (And if you’re still deciding how much of a website to have at all, that’s the bigger question we cover here.)
The wrong question is “do prices belong on a website?” The right one is “what would putting mine there do to the kind of client I want?”
The case for
Showing prices builds trust and saves everyone time.
A visible price is a signal of confidence — it says you know what you’re worth and you’re not going to size up the customer before quoting. It builds trust, and it does quiet filtering for you: people who can’t afford you rule themselves out before they ever fill out a form, and the ones who do reach out already accept roughly what things cost.
This is strongest when your work is fairly standard — set services, predictable scope, a price you could say out loud without ten follow-up questions. If someone could reasonably expect a straight answer to “what does that cost?”, not giving one on your site mostly just adds friction. We take this route ourselves: our pricing is right on the page, one number, no tiers.
The case against
A bare number can cost you the conversation.
When your work is custom, a price with no context does you a disservice. A number on a page has nothing to anchor it — so a big one scares off people who’d have happily paid it once they understood the value, and a small one boxes you in when the job turns out to be bigger. Worse, it hands a competitor an easy way to undercut you on a spreadsheet, where you can’t explain why you’re worth more.
The real cost of a public number here isn’t the number — it’s that you never get the conversation where you show what they’re actually getting. If every job is genuinely different, a flat price on the site is a decision made in the dark.
The middle path
You don’t have to pick all-or-nothing.
Most of the benefit of showing prices comes from filtering — and you can get that without committing to a flat number. Give people enough to self-select: a starting point, a typical range, or a “from” figure. It sends away the tire-kickers and the bargain-hunters while keeping the door open for the real conversation.
Copy & adapt — range wording that filters gently
“Projects typically start at $[X].” • “Most clients invest between $[X] and $[Y], depending on scope.” • “Standard [service] is $[X]; anything custom I’ll quote after a quick chat.”
Then, when someone’s actually serious, the number they get isn’t a guess off a webpage — it’s a real quote built for their job. That’s a craft of its own, and we broke it down in how to write an estimate that gets accepted.
Putting it into practice
If you show them, show them well.
Deciding to show a price is half of it. How you show it decides whether it helps or just sits there.
Put the price where the service is. People look for the number right where they’re reading about the thing they want — not on a separate “Pricing” page they have to go hunting for. A price someone has to search for does half the filtering and none of the reassuring.
Say what it includes. A bare number invites doubt; a single line on what’s covered turns it into a decision. “$X — includes A, B, and C” answers the follow-up question before it’s asked.
Keep it current. An out-of-date price is worse than no price — it opens the relationship with a correction. Keep your prices somewhere you can change in one place, so what people see always matches what you charge.
Don’t hide behind “contact for pricing.” It feels like the safe middle ground, but to someone ready to buy it often reads exactly like a hidden number: probably expensive. If you’re not going to show a firm price, show a range or a fast way to get a real one — not a dead end.
Common questions
The questions this always raises.
Should I show prices for products as well as services?
Products are almost always a yes — people expect a price on something they can put in a cart. Services are where the real judgment call lives, because scope varies. If you sell both, you can happily show one and quote the other.
Will showing prices look unprofessional, or hurt my SEO?
Neither. A clear price reads as confidence, not cheapness, and a genuinely useful pricing page is the kind of thing search engines are glad to show. Vagueness is what costs you — with people and with search alike.
What if someone asks for a discount once they’ve seen the price?
Then you’re negotiating from a number instead of from nothing. A public price gives you a clear anchor — you can hold it, or discount from it on purpose, which is a far stronger position than pulling a figure out of the air on the spot.
The best of both
Off the public page, ready the moment they’re serious.
If you land on keeping prices off your site, the trick is to make the private number effortless to produce — so “can you send me a price?” gets a clean, fast, professional answer instead of a delay. Quote’d builds a branded quote from your details in a couple of minutes and sends it as a link you can track — so you keep the flexibility of quoting per job without ever looking slow about it. You get the filtering of a public price and the control of a private one.