Someone asks what you charge before you’ve seen the job. You say it depends, which is true, and they hear a dodge.
That exchange is why this question won’t go away. And the usual framing, transparency good or transparency bad, is the wrong argument.
The real question is narrower: which conversation do you want to skip?
It removes people from your calendar. That’s the mechanism, and whether it’s good depends entirely on who gets removed.
Publish a starting figure and you lose the people who were never going to pay it. Most of them would have wasted a call, a site visit and a quote before reaching the same conclusion. Removing them is pure gain.
You also lose some people who would have paid it, once they understood what they were buying. They see a number without context, decide it’s more than they expected, and never call. That’s the cost, and it’s real.
So it comes down to the ratio between those two groups, which depends on facts about your business rather than on a philosophy.
When to publish
Your price is predictable. If a standard job lands within a narrow band, a number is honest and useful. Hiding a predictable price reads as evasion.
Your ticket is small enough to decide alone. Nobody schedules a consultation to find out what a drain clearing costs. They want a number and the next available slot.
You’re more expensive than your competition and you know why. Counterintuitive, but publishing works well here. It filters early, and it lets you spend the whole first call on value rather than on a price reveal at the end.
People are searching for your price anyway. If they’re typing “cost” into Google, someone will answer that question. It may as well be you, on your own page, with your own framing.
When not to
Price varies by more than about double. A range from four hundred to six thousand tells a reader nothing and makes you look unsure.
The scope genuinely can’t be known remotely. If the job depends on what’s behind the wall, an honest number needs an inspection, and saying so plainly is better than inventing a figure.
You compete on fit rather than price. If your advantage is understanding a complicated situation, a number stripped of that context works against you.
You’d have to publish a number you don’t stand behind. A “starting at” figure nobody actually pays does more damage than silence, because the real quote then feels like a bait and switch.
Want a second opinion on this?
Book a free consultationThe middle option most people miss
You don’t have to choose between a price list and “it depends.”
Publish the shape of your pricing without publishing a fixed number. What drives the cost up or down. What a typical job in each tier looks like. What’s included and what isn’t. A range with the reasons attached, so the reader can place themselves in it.
That answers the real question, which is usually not “what is the exact price” but “am I in the right neighborhood, and are you going to be straight with me.”
It also gives you a page worth ranking. Pricing pages attract people with high intent and few remaining objections, which is the most valuable traffic on your site. Wherever that page sits, the clarity principles in why minimalist, conversion-focused design wins apply hardest there.
Shape looks like this in practice. Name the three or four things that move the number, access, size, materials, urgency. Give a typical job for each tier with enough detail that a reader recognises their own situation. Say what is always included so nobody assumes an extra. Then say plainly that an exact figure needs a look, and give them the fastest route to getting one.
How to decide this week
Look at your last twenty jobs. If most landed within a predictable band, publish. If they’re all over the place, publish the shape instead.
Count how many calls end without a quote because the price surprised them. That number is what publishing would have saved you.
Then ask what you actually want your first conversation to be about. If you want it to be about the work rather than the cost, put the cost somewhere they can find it first. Filtering earlier is also one of the cheapest ways to raise the return on everything else you spend. And if the honest blocker is that you can’t explain your own range, that’s the harder problem, and why website pricing varies so much is how we answer it about our own work.
And whatever you decide, decide it rather than defaulting into it. Most businesses do not have a position on this. They have an absence of one, which reads to customers as evasion whether or not it is.
If you’ve been going back and forth on this, the question isn’t whether to be transparent. It’s which conversation you’d rather not have twice a week.
Frequently asked questions
Won’t competitors see my prices?
They already know. Competitors call for quotes. The only people your silence reliably keeps in the dark are customers.
What if I want to charge different customers differently?
Then publishing a fixed number will constrain you, and publishing the shape is the better route.
Does a price page help with search?
It tends to attract people close to a decision. Whether it ranks depends on the usual factors, but the intent behind that traffic is unusually good.
What if my prices change often?
Publish the structure rather than the figures, or commit to a review date and keep it. An out-of-date price page is worse than none.
