Publishing your prices decides who gets in touch

The question is filtering, not transparency

The argument about published prices is usually conducted in the language of honesty, as though showing numbers were straightforward and withholding them were evasive. That framing is not much use, because plenty of entirely reputable trades cannot publish a meaningful price and plenty of shabby ones can.

The practical question is what a published number does to the flow of enquiries. It removes the people who were never going to pay that much, before they occupy any of your time, and it also removes some people who would have paid it after a conversation. Whether that trade is good depends on which of those two groups is larger in your market.

What it does for the buyer

Asking what something costs is mildly uncomfortable for most people. It requires making contact, describing what they want to a stranger, and then either accepting a number or extracting themselves from a conversation they started. A visible price removes all of that, and a proportion of buyers will simply not begin the process without it.

It also signals that the price is the price, which is reassuring to anyone who suspects that quotes vary according to how wealthy the customer looks. In consumer trades particularly, that suspicion is common and a published figure answers it before it’s raised.

What it does to you

A published number is a ceiling as much as a floor. It is difficult to charge a demanding client more than the figure on your own website, even when their job genuinely warrants it, and the effect is to compress everything towards the published level.

It is also visible to everybody else in your trade, which matters less than people fear and is not nothing. And it removes the ability to price a job by what it involves, which is precisely the advantage a quoting business has over a catalogue. In work that varies substantially between clients, publishing a single number means either quoting for the easy version and arguing later, or quoting for the difficult version and losing the easy ones.

Where it genuinely cannot work

Some work varies so much between engagements that any published figure would be misleading. Where the same nominal job can take a day or a fortnight depending on circumstances you cannot see from the enquiry, a headline price is not information; it’s a number the client will hold you to and you will spend the whole relationship explaining.

That is a real reason and it is also the excuse used by businesses that simply have not done the work of understanding their own costs. The test is whether you could describe the conditions under which the price would change. If you can describe them, you can publish something.

The useful middle positions

Between a full price list and silence there is a great deal of room. A starting figure, honestly set at the level a straightforward job actually costs, filters most of the mismatched enquiries without pretending every job is identical. A range does the same and manages expectations at both ends.

A worked example is better still: this is a job we did, this is what was involved, this is what it came to. It teaches the buyer what drives the number, which is the thing they most need to understand and the thing a bare figure never conveys. A published minimum is the lightest option of all, and it does most of the filtering work with almost none of the cost.

Whatever you publish, you will have to live with it

The most common error is publishing an optimistic figure — the one you would charge on a good day for an easy client — and then discovering that every enquiry arrives anchored to it. A starting price that isn’t actually achievable is worse than none, because it produces conversations in which you spend the first ten minutes explaining why the real number is higher.

Publish something you would be content to receive repeatedly. Then treat it as a decision that gets reviewed, because a figure left in place for four years is a price rise you have been quietly declining to take.

And whatever form you choose, put a date or a validity period next to it. Prices that have visibly been reviewed read as considered rather than arbitrary, and a stated period of validity gives you an unarguable moment to change them without anybody feeling that the rules moved during the game.