Should you put prices on your website
Both the usual answers are wrong. There is a middle option that keeps the qualifying without the silence.
Updated
There are two standard answers to this and both are wrong for most local businesses.
The first is never show prices, because every job is different and a number without context invites people to compare you on one dimension you will lose. The second is show everything, because customers hate opacity and transparency builds trust. The first loses good customers. The second wins a price war you did not enter.
What hiding prices actually does
The argument for hiding is that it filters. Someone who wants a number and cannot get one will call, and then you can sell properly. That is true of a certain kind of customer and false of most of them.
What it mostly does is filter by willingness to make a phone call, which correlates with almost nothing you care about. It removes tyre-kickers, and it removes the busy professional with the budget who was comparing three companies on a Tuesday night and picked the two that gave him something to work with. You cannot filter one without the other, because from your website they look identical.
The question underneath the question
Nobody visiting your site wants a precise quote from a web page. They want to know whether you are in their universe. Hundreds, low thousands, or a number they should not have asked about. Answering that is not the same as publishing a price list, and conflating the two is why this debate goes in circles.
What showing everything does
The opposite failure is subtler. A flat published price for work whose scope genuinely varies is a promise you will spend the rest of the year walking back on site, and every one of those conversations starts with the customer feeling misled.
It also invites exactly the comparison you do not want. A visitor holding three numbers and no way to tell what is different about them will pick the smallest, and the business that wins that way tends to be the one leaving something out.
The middle option
Ask the handful of questions that actually drive the price, then give a range based on the answers. That is what a good estimator does on the phone in ninety seconds, and it is entirely reproducible on a web page.
The tool
Instant Estimate Widget
Interactive price estimator - visitors get a ballpark, you get a qualified lead
Instant. Live when you hit Publish
Instant Estimate Widget
$450 setup, then $90 a month
Three things happen at once, and the third is the one people do not anticipate.
The visitor gets an answer
A range, tied to what they told you, with the honest caveat that a firm number needs a look at the job. That is enough to decide whether to keep talking, which is all they wanted.
You get a qualified enquiry instead of a voicemail
The property type, the scope, the access, the timing. You arrive at the site visit knowing what you are looking at, and some of the visits you would have made stop being necessary.
The bad-fit enquiries disqualify themselves, politely
Someone whose budget is a third of your range works that out on your website rather than after you drove across town. They leave without a bad experience and you keep the afternoon. This is the filtering that hiding prices was supposed to do, and it is the version that actually works.
How to set the range
- 01Pull your last twenty invoices for the job type. Not what you wish you charged; what you actually charged.
- 02Throw out the top and bottom one or two. Every trade has the outlier that would make the range meaningless.
- 03Publish the band that remains, and say plainly what pushes a job toward each end. That sentence does more work than the numbers do, because it teaches the customer how to think about the price.
- 04Review it twice a year. A stale range is worse than none, and materials move.
When hiding really is right
There are genuine exceptions and it is worth naming them rather than pretending the answer is universal.
- Work where the first conversation is the product, and the scope is genuinely unknowable until someone with expertise has looked. Some professional services sit here.
- Insurance work, where the customer is not the payer and a published range would confuse a claim rather than inform a decision.
- Bespoke work with no comparable previous jobs. If you cannot produce twenty similar invoices, you do not have a range, you have a guess.
Even in those cases, a structured intake is worth having. The value was never only the number; it was arriving at the conversation informed. And once the enquiry is in, the other half of the job is not letting it go quiet.
Not sure whether pricing is your bottleneck or something further up the path? The free Growth Score takes seven questions and tells you where the biggest gap is.
Related reading
Silence after a quote almost never means no. It usually means not yet, and nobody asked again.
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