A reader is on your services page. They are not browsing any more. They know they need this thing, they have found their way to you, and they have one question.
They scroll down. A description. Benefits. Three icons. "An individual approach to every client." A form. They scroll back up once to check whether they missed something, and then they close the tab.
The question they arrived with was "how much does this cost". Your page answered "request a quote".
"Request a quote" does not filter what you think it filters
The logic behind hiding a price is not stupid. With no number on show, nothing scares anybody off in advance. You get to talk first. And you get to price the situation rather than a table.
The first of those simply is not true. You did not remove the number. You removed only the part where the number comes from you. The reader estimates it anyway: from the competitor's page that was open before yours, from memory, or from something three years ago in another town. The price conversation happens; you are just not in the room.
The second part is true, and that is exactly where the catch is. "Request a quote" really does filter. Only not by budget. By patience.
Who writes? The person who has already collected three quotes and is collecting a fourth. Who does not write? The person who only wanted to know whether your service fits their budget, and whose budget would have fitted. They did not drop out because you are expensive. They dropped out because finding out required correspondence.
And then there is the run of enquiries from people who do not have a third of what your work costs. Those people do write. "Request a quote" does not filter them at all, because for them writing is the only way to find out.
Three fears that take the price off the page
"A competitor will see it." They already know. In a small market, the people doing the work know each other's price level with no help from any website: they meet at the same tenders, lose to the same bids, and hear numbers from clients who say them out loud. The only person you genuinely hid the price from is the one who wanted to buy.
"Every job is different." Almost always true, and almost always the wrong reason. That the final figure cannot be given in advance does not mean the order of magnitude cannot. A builder does not know the price of your house before measuring it. They quote a price per square metre anyway, and you work out for yourself whether the conversation continues.
"We are the expensive ones." Then the number is the only place where you get to explain that. With no price, the reader is left with a comparison they make on their own, without any of your reasoning in it. A high figure with a sentence beside it about what is inside it does work. A missing figure does nothing.
Four honest ways to put a number on the page
A price list is not the only form this takes. You do not have to publish a table with everything in it.
- A from-price. The smallest job you actually take, and what is in it. "From" with nothing behind it is a trick; "from 900 euros, including X, Y and Z" is information. The figure here is an illustration, not our price list.
- A range. Two numbers, and one sentence about what moves a reader from one end of it to the other. Without that sentence, every reader assumes they land at the top.
- A worked example. One real job written out: what the scope was, what the price included, what it did not, and what it came to. This is the strongest form, because it is a price and a piece of evidence at the same time.
- The price of the smallest thing. When a big job genuinely cannot be measured before somebody looks at it, publish the price of the looking. A survey, an audit, a first hour. The reader can buy one small thing, and you get a number to talk about.
One rule covers all four. A number with no reasoning is a trap; a number with reasoning is information. "Websites from 1500 euros" produces two enquiries: one from somebody who thinks that is the final price, and one from somebody who thinks it is not. The same number with a sentence saying what moves it does the opposite.
What a number does even when it is not final
A number on the page does three things, and two of them work for you rather than for the reader.
It sets the scale. If the reader has already seen on your page that this is a conversation about thousands, the quote is not a shock later. That entire exchange which otherwise begins with "oh, I thought this cost a couple of hundred" simply does not happen.
It sorts the enquiries. Not cruelly: somebody who cannot afford it does not write, and saves their own time too. You write fewer quotes that go nowhere.
And it changes the first question. With no number, the conversation opens on "how much". With a number, it opens on "what is included". The second is a sales conversation. The first is a negotiation you start from a defensive position.
When silence is genuinely right
There are jobs whose price cannot be given in advance, and that is not an excuse. A tender whose terms are not published yet. A production line whose cost depends on three suppliers. Work where half the price is material that moves within the month.
But two sentences get said as one here, and they need separating:
"I cannot give you a price." Often true.
"I cannot tell you how I price." Almost never.
Even with no figure, the shape of your pricing can be written down: whether you charge by the hour or by the project, what the typical order of magnitude is, what moves it up and down, and what the first step includes. That is not a price list. It is more honest than silence, and the reader can still decide whether to carry on.
A machine cannot quote a number that is not there
People are no longer the only readers of your page. "How much does a new roof cost in Tartu?" is exactly the kind of question put to an assistant, and the answer gets assembled from pages that have numbers on them.
An assistant will not call you for clarification. It skips you and quotes whoever wrote the figure down. This is not a separate marketing channel needing separate work: it is the same change that helps a human, only a machine is stricter about it. How assistants read a website is a longer story here.
And then the uncomfortable part
Most sites leave the price out for no strategic reason at all. They leave it out because nobody knows exactly what it is.
The price forms at the moment the quote is written, partly from a feeling and partly from how busy you happen to be. Two similar jobs got two fairly different prices last year. There is nothing to write down, because writing it down would mean deciding.
That is a real problem, but it is not a website problem. An empty pricing page is a symptom rather than a cause. And there is good news in it: a number you have to write on a page forces the decision to be made. Most owners who publish prices say afterwards that the useful part was not the page, it was the couple of hours spent working out their own number.
What to do this week
- Pick one service. The most common one, not the most complicated one.
- Decide one number. A from-price or a range. Pull together the same jobs from the past year and see where they actually landed.
- Write one sentence beside it saying what moves that number.
- Put it on the service page, not on a separate pricing page nobody reaches.
- Look at your enquiries a month later. Not the count, the shape: whether they are more specific. What website numbers actually tell you is a subject of its own.
And one sentence to test your own page against. If a reader has to write to you in order to find out whether they can afford you at all, they will not write. They will go to whoever answered on the page.
If your site has silences other than the price - unanswered questions a reader leaves over - those are written out here. And if you are weighing up what to pay for the website itself, that is a separate story; ours are published on a page, which is the only honest option for an article like this one.
Frequently asked questions
Usually yes, at least as an order of magnitude. A missing price does not filter readers by budget, it filters them by patience: the one collecting a fourth quote writes to you, and the one who only wanted to know whether you fit their budget does not. A price list is not the only form this can take. A from-price, a range, one worked example, or the cost of the smallest first step all do the same job.
Separate two sentences: "I cannot give you a price" and "I cannot tell you how I price". The first is often true; the second almost never is. Write the shape of your pricing on the page: whether you charge by hour or by project, the typical order of magnitude, what moves it up and down, and what the first step includes. If the job can only be measured on site, publish the price of that survey or audit.
They know your price level anyway. In a small market the people doing the work meet at the same tenders, lose to the same bids, and hear numbers from clients who say them out loud. A published price hides something only from the person who wanted to buy. And if you are the more expensive option, the figure is the one place where you get to write down what is inside it.
No number should stand on the page alone. "From 1500 euros" produces two enquiries: one from somebody who reads it as the final price and one from somebody who reads it as an empty trick. The same figure with a single sentence about what is included and what moves it does the opposite. The strongest form is one real job written out: the scope, what the price covered, what it did not, and what it came to.
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