There's a little dance that happens in most service businesses, and you've been on both sides of it.

A potential customer asks, "So roughly what does this cost?" And the business says, "Great question — why don't we hop on a call to discuss your needs and your budget?" Which everyone in the conversation understands to mean: I'm not going to tell you the price until I've figured out how much I can get away with charging you.

I decided a while ago to stop doing that. My prices are on a page on my website. All of them. You can read them before you ever talk to me, before you fill out a form, before you give me your email. And I want to make the case for why — because I think hiding your prices is one of those things small businesses do because everyone else does it, not because it actually works.

Why everyone hides their prices

Let's be fair to the instinct first, because it doesn't come from nowhere.

The standard advice — the stuff you'll hear in every business group and read in every "grow your agency" thread — goes like this: never put prices on your site, because you want to "get them on a call." Once you're talking to a live human, you can "communicate your value," "anchor high," and "tailor the price to the project." Publishing a number, the thinking goes, lets people rule you out before you've had a chance to sell them, and it boxes you into a figure you might want to exceed.

And there's a sliver of truth in there. A live conversation does let you explain things a price tag can't. Some work genuinely is custom and can't be reduced to a single number.

But underneath most of it is something less flattering: fear. Fear that if people see the number, they'll say no. Fear of being undercut by someone cheaper. Fear of committing to a price and then resenting it when the job turns out bigger than expected. Hiding the price feels safer. It keeps your options open.

The problem is that the thing protecting you from the "no" is also costing you the "yes."

What a hidden price actually says to a buyer

Put yourself back in the customer's chair, because you're a customer all the time.

When you're shopping for something and the price is just... not there — replaced by "Contact us for a quote" — what's your honest gut reaction? For most people it's some flavour of suspicion. If they won't tell me, it's probably expensive. Or the price depends on how I look. Or I'm about to get pulled into a sales call I'll have to fight my way out of.

Hiding the price doesn't read as premium. It reads as friction, and often as a little bit shady. It puts a tollbooth between the customer and the basic information they need to make a decision, and it asks them to hand over their contact details and sit through a pitch just to find out something you could have told them in three seconds.

The old line "if you have to ask, you can't afford it" works for exactly one category: genuine ultra-luxury, where the mystery is part of the product. You are almost certainly not selling that. You're selling websites, or bookkeeping, or massage therapy, or lawn care — things where the customer wants a competent provider at a fair, knowable price, and where making them ask just makes you harder to buy from than the next option.

The good clients you're quietly losing

Here's the part that should sting a little, because it's the real cost.

The best clients — the ones who are organized, decisive, respectful of your time, and ready to pay a fair rate — are exactly the ones who self-qualify. They look at your pricing, decide "yes, that's in my range, this person is for me," and reach out already half-sold. They're not looking for the cheapest option; they're looking for the right one, and they appreciate a business that respects them enough to be upfront.

When you hide your price, you make that person do extra work. You make them fill out a form and book a call and wait for a reply just to learn a number that either works for them or doesn't. A chunk of them won't bother. They'll go to the competitor who just told them. You never even hear about those losses — they happen silently, in a browser tab that gets closed.

So the irony is brutal: the "get them on a call" strategy is designed to win clients, but the clients it filters out are disproportionately the good ones — the ones who had their act together and were ready to go.

The bad clients you're attracting instead

Meanwhile, who does happily go through the whole rigamarole of forms and calls and "let's discuss your budget"?

Often, the people who want to negotiate. The ones treating the call as round one of a haggle. The tire-kickers collecting six quotes to play against each other. The ones who, the second they hear a number, start the "well, my nephew could do it for…" routine. Hidden pricing acts like a magnet for exactly the clients who are going to grind you down, because the opaque process is an invitation to negotiate — you've signaled that the price is soft and the conversation is where it gets decided.

Transparent pricing does the opposite. A published number is a quiet way of saying this is the price, and it's the same for everyone. It pre-filters the hagglers, because there's visibly nothing to haggle over. The people who book are the people who saw the number and were fine with it. You've done your screening before you've spent a single minute on a call.

"But my work is custom — I can't just put a number on it"

This is the honest objection, and it's a real one, so let me answer it properly instead of pretending it away.

Yes — a lot of service work genuinely varies. A five-page site and a fifty-page site aren't the same job, and you can't quote either one blind. But "I can't publish one exact universal price" is not the same as "I can't publish any pricing at all," and the gap between those two is where most businesses hide.

You don't need to commit to a precise figure for every possible job. You need to give people enough to know whether they're in the right room. A few ways to do that:

Starting prices. "Websites start at $1,500." Now a customer knows the floor. If their budget is $400, they self-select out and you both save the call. If it's $5,000, they lean in.

Tiers. Three packages — good, better, best — with what each includes and a fixed price for each. This handles 80% of buyers, and the 20% with genuinely custom needs at least know the shape of your pricing before they reach out.

"From" pricing on the custom stuff. For the truly bespoke work, "custom projects from $6,000, quoted after a short call." You've set the floor and the expectation. Nobody's blindsided, and the people who book the call are pre-qualified for that range.

The point isn't to eliminate every conversation. It's to make sure the conversations you do have are with people who already know roughly what things cost and are okay with it. That's a completely different — and much better — call than one that opens with a stranger fishing for your number.

"Won't competitors just see my prices and undercut me?"

This is the other fear, and it deserves a straight answer: yes, a competitor can see your published prices. And mostly, it doesn't matter.

If your entire advantage is being the cheapest, then sure — someone can always read your number and post a dollar less. But if cheapest-wins is your whole strategy, you have a much bigger problem than your pricing page, because there is always someone willing to go broke faster than you. Racing to the bottom is a race you don't want to win.

The thing is, customers almost never choose on price alone — they choose on price relative to trust. A competitor undercutting your published number by 10% doesn't automatically win, because the buyer is also weighing your work, your reviews, how you came across, whether you answered quickly, whether you seem like you'll actually finish the job. Price is one input, not the whole equation. And the competitor frantically undercutting a public number is usually signalling that low price is the only thing they've got — which is its own quiet warning to a good client.

Hiding your price to stop competitors from seeing it also hides it from the customers you're trying to win. You're blinding your buyers to protect yourself from rivals who could've found your rates a dozen other ways. Bad trade.

What it actually did for me

When I moved my prices into the open, a few things happened, and not the disaster the conventional wisdom predicted.

The calls got better. Fewer of them, but better — because the people reaching out had already seen the prices and were fine with them. I stopped spending evenings on "discovery calls" that were really just budget reveals that ended in an awkward "oh, that's more than I thought."

The negotiating mostly stopped. When the price is printed and it's the same for everyone, there's nothing to argue about. "That's my standard pricing" is a complete sentence, and the page already said it for me before the conversation started.

And — this is the part I didn't expect — it made me steadier. When I had to invent a number on every call, I'd talk myself down in real time, especially with someone I liked or didn't want to disappoint. A published price took that weakness out of my hands. The number was decided in advance, in daylight, when I was thinking clearly — not in the moment, under the small social pressure of not wanting to seem expensive. If you've ever caved on a price because the conversation got slightly uncomfortable, this is the fix. The structure holds the line so you don't have to.

The honest caveat

I'm not going to tell you this is universal, because it isn't, and you'd stop trusting me the moment I oversold it.

There's a narrow band of work where keeping pricing off the page genuinely makes sense: true enterprise deals, highly bespoke consulting where every engagement is wildly different, situations where the "price" is really a negotiated contract with a dozen variables. If that's your business, fine — but be honest with yourself about whether it actually is, or whether you're just using "it's complicated" as cover for the fear of showing the number.

For the vast majority of small businesses — the trades, the studios, the clinics, the freelancers, the shops — your pricing is knowable enough to publish in some form. And the form matters less than the act. Starting prices, tiers, ranges, packages: any of them beats a "contact us for a quote" button that quietly sends your best customers to your competitor.

The bottom line

Putting your prices on a page is a small thing that signals a big one. It says you're confident in what you charge, you respect the customer's time, and you've got nothing to hide. It filters out the hagglers and waves in the people who are ready to buy. And if you're someone who finds the money conversation uncomfortable — most of us are — it quietly does the hardest part for you, before you ever have to say a word out loud.

The fear says hiding the price keeps you safe. In practice, it mostly keeps you small. Show the number. The right people were never scared of it — and the ones who were, you didn't want anyway.

This is how I run things, for what it's worth — my pricing is right there on the site, all of it. If that sounds like the kind of person you'd rather work with, you know where to find me.