Should you put prices on your website? The argument is usually the wrong one.

Every service business has this argument, usually more than once. One side says publishing prices scares people off and invites competitors to undercut you. The other says hiding them wastes everybody's time and makes you look expensive.

Both are describing real things, which is why the argument never resolves. It resolves when you stop asking whether to show a price and start asking what kind of price you have.

A number or a shape

Some work has a price. Drain clearing, a standard service call, an oil change, a haircut, a defined package. The number might move with time of day or urgency, but there is a number and you know it before the phone rings.

Other work genuinely does not. A kitchen remodel, a custom build, anything where the honest answer depends on things you cannot see from your desk. Publishing a single figure there is not brave, it is inaccurate, and you will spend the year explaining why the real quote is different.

Almost every business treats itself as the second kind. Most are the first kind with some exceptions.

When hiding it costs you the call

If your work has a number and the site does not show it, you are asking somebody to make contact in order to find out something you could have told them. A share of people will do that. A larger share will look at the next listing, which is one tap away and which has been sitting there the whole time.

This is the cost nobody sees, because it does not arrive as a complaint or a lost quote. It arrives as calls that never happened, which look identical to no demand at all.

Publishing the shape instead

For the genuinely variable work, there is a middle option that most businesses skip because they are stuck arguing about the two extremes.

Publish what drives the number. Say which factors move it and roughly how much, describe what a typical project in each direction looks like, and be specific about what the cheapest real version is. That last part does more work than anything else on the page, because the person reading is not deciding between you and a competitor yet. They are deciding whether this is a thing they can afford to start.

It is the same move that rescues a stalled estimate: naming the smaller option converts the people who assumed you only did the expensive version.

What a price does that nothing else does

It qualifies, and it does it in both directions.

A number on the page stops you spending Tuesday evening quoting somebody whose budget was never in range, and it stops that person spending their Tuesday evening finding out. Both of you get the time back. The businesses that most fear publishing prices are frequently the ones drowning in quotes that never close, which is the same problem viewed from the other end.

Our own answer, since it is fair to ask

We do not publish prices. Typing our pricing URL sends you to the contact page, which is exactly the behaviour this post has been describing.

The defensible reason is that our work is the second kind, where the number depends on what you already have, what is broken, and how much of it you want owned rather than advised on. The indefensible version of that reason is the one every agency uses, and we are aware the two are hard to tell apart from outside.

So the standard we hold ourselves to is the middle path above: we publish the anatomy of what a website costs and what moves it, rather than a menu. If a business hides both the number and the shape, that is not confidentiality. That is asking the customer to take a meeting to learn something they should have been able to read.

If you are trying to work out which kind of pricing your business actually has, and what belongs on the page, book a strategy call. It is usually a shorter conversation than the internal argument that preceded it.