Should I Put Prices on My Website?

Should I put prices on my website?

Yes. And I want to tell you about the one downside nobody mentions, because I ran straight into it myself.

Most website designers will not put prices on their site. You get "contact us for a quote." We went the other direction years ago and put real numbers on the page. Sites start at $3,000. Ongoing is $750 a year, which covers unlimited updates, maintenance, hosting, and Cloudflare security/performance.

Why publish prices at all?

The main reason is simple. People want to know whether they can afford you before they spend twenty minutes on a phone call finding out they can't.

Publishing does a few things at once. It filters out the people who were never going to buy, before either of you spends the time. The people who do call already know the number, so the conversation starts somewhere useful instead of circling. And it tells everybody that you are not sizing them up and quoting based on what you think they can pay.

That last one lands harder than you would expect. A lot of people have been quoted that way before, and they remember it.

So what is the downside?

Here is what happened to us.

About a month after we rebuilt our own website, I asked ChatGPT who the best website design company is around Bryan and College Station. It listed five companies, then sorted them by what each one is best for.

Professional services. Local small business. Branding and website launch. Website plus SEO and ongoing marketing.  Stuff we all do.

Then us. 'Affordable custom websites'.

Four companies got sorted by the work they do. We got sorted by what we charge.

Why did that happen?

Well, we were the only company on that list publishing real numbers. Everybody else says contact us for a quote.

An AI reads your website hunting for the clearest, most specific, most comparable thing about you. For four of those companies that was the type of work they take on. For us it was a dollar figure.  Why? Because we handed it one.

The transparency worked exactly the way we intended. It just became the headline.

Does that mean you should hide your prices?

Nope, and ours are staying up.

The problem was never that the price is on the page. The problem is that the price was the SHARPEST thing on the page. Everything else about us was written as standard content, and that is harder for a machine to grab hold of than a number is.

The fix is to make something else more clear. Who you are best for. Who is NOT a good fit.  What kind of work you do most. Said plainly enough that a machine can repeat it back.

What to do if you publish prices

Put the number up. Then make sure it is not the most specific thing on your site.

Write a plain sentence about who you serve best. Something along the lines of "best for local service businesses that need to be found by people nearby." Put it near the top, in words, not inside a graphic where nothing can read it.

Then read your homepage cold, the way a stranger would, and ask yourself what the sharpest fact on it is. Whatever that is, that is what you are going to be known for.

Frequently asked questions

Will publishing prices scare customers away?

It scares off the ones who could never afford you, which saves you both the time. The people who do call tend to be further along in deciding.

What if my pricing varies a lot by project?

Publish a starting number and say plainly that it varies. "Starting at," with an honest note about what moves it, beats saying nothing.

Will competitors use my prices against me?

They can already get your prices, because they can call and ask like anybody else. The real question is whether your customers can see them.

Will an AI decide my business is cheap if I publish low numbers?

It might sort you that way. It did us. That is a reason to make your positioning clearer, not a reason to take the number down. 

Where should prices go on the site?

On their own page, linked from the main navigation. Buried pricing reads as hidden pricing, and people notice.

Let us talk it through

If you are trying to decide whether to publish your prices, or you already do and are not sure how it is landing, call me at 979-217-1544 or reach out through our contact page.

Tom Bruch has built websites since 1998 and is the owner of Aggieland Website Design.