“That’s more than we were expecting.”
You have heard that sentence at minute forty of a call you booked a week in advance, after the discovery questions, after the explanation of your process, after you have liked each other enough that the number lands as a disappointment rather than a filter.
An hour of your time, an hour of theirs, and the information that ended it could have been delivered by a web page in two seconds for nothing.
That is the cost of the blank space where your prices should be, and it is the only argument for publishing that I find consistently persuasive. Not transparency as a value. Not trust. Just the hour, repeated, every week, forever.
So publish something. The question worth arguing about is not whether, it is which of three formats fits a business whose work genuinely does vary, and I will get to those. First the two objections, because they are the reason you have not done it.
What the silence actually selects for
The stated logic is that keeping the number back protects your negotiating position. Let somebody fall for the work first, then discuss money.
Look at who that filter catches, though.
A buyer with a real budget and a decision to make this quarter is the person who most needs to know whether you are in range, because their time is the scarcest thing they have. Make them spend an hour to find out and some of them simply will not start.
A person with no budget, no timeline and a vague interest in the topic is delighted to take a free hour of your expertise. Nothing about your silence deters them. It is the most attractive possible offer to exactly the wrong prospect.
A blank pricing page does not filter out the unserious. It filters out the busy.
That is the asymmetry, and once you see it the negotiating argument looks like what it is, which is a preference for having the conversation on your terms, paid for with your own calendar.
The competitor objection, which you already lost
The other reason given is that competitors would see it.
They know. In any market with more than a handful of players, your competitors have quoted head to head against you, hired somebody who used to work for you, or been handed your proposal by a prospect using it as leverage. Your pricing is the least protected information in your business.
The only group your silence reliably keeps in the dark is buyers.
The three formats that work
This is where the real objection lives, and it is a fair one. If your smallest engagement is a tenth of your largest, any single number on a page misleads somebody. The answer is format rather than courage.
A floor. One number, the smallest engagement you will actually accept. “Projects start at $8,000.” It is the easiest to publish because it is simply true, it commits you to nothing at the top end, and it does most of the qualifying work on its own. If you only ever do one of these three, do this.
A range tied to a named scope. Not “$5,000 to $50,000”, which tells a reader nothing except that you are nervous. Tie the range to something recognizable: a single-location local SEO engagement runs this much a month, a multi-location program depends on how many locations and starts higher. The scope is what makes the range mean anything.
A worked example. One engagement described properly. What the client needed, what was in scope, how long it ran, what it cost. This converts best in my experience because it lets a reader locate themselves against something concrete rather than against a bracket.
And the format to avoid: three tiers with names, for work that is actually bespoke. Bronze, Silver, Gold, or Starter, Growth, Scale. Buyers of custom services read invented tiers instantly as invented, and you have spent your credibility to avoid saying one honest number.
When not publishing is genuinely right
Three situations, and I would not argue with any of them.
You sell into a bid-based process where the buyer sets the budget. Public sector, large enterprise procurement. Publishing a number there anchors you below what the budget would have borne, and the mechanism is the opposite of a consumer market.
Your price varies by the client’s size or risk rather than by the scope of work. This is real in parts of professional services, where the same task carries different exposure depending on who you do it for. Any single number genuinely is a lie.
Or you are midway through repricing and publishing would lock in the number you are leaving. That is legitimate and temporary, and I would note that people hide behind it for years. Put a date on it.
Nobody actually knows the answer, which changes what you should do
I went looking for a controlled test of this, and there isn’t one.
What exists is vendor research. One survey reports decision-makers rating price transparency as very important or crucial rising sharply since 2022, which sounds plausible and comes from a firm that sells pricing work. A frequently cited conversion lift attributed to a 2025 Forrester study I could not confirm against Forrester. A case study where a site went from 1% to 7% conversion after adding a pricing page and also changed several other things at the same time.
Nobody has published an A/B test of a pricing page measured through to accepted sales-qualified leads rather than form fills. For a question every services business on earth asks, that is a strange gap, and it means anybody quoting you a percentage is quoting their own sample.
Which is actually freeing. It is not an optimization with a known answer. It is a decision about which work you want to do, and you can run the test yourself in a quarter.
The number to watch, and it goes the wrong way
Here is how to measure it, and brace for the first result.
Do not watch conversion rate on the pricing page. It will fall, and that is the page working.
Watch two things instead. The count of calls booked, which should go down. And the proportion of those calls that reach a second meeting, which should go up. A floor on a page is a machine that converts inquiry volume into inquiry quality, and if your volume does not drop at all then the number is not specific enough to be doing anything.
A pricing page is supposed to reduce your leads. That is the deliverable.
If both numbers fall, your floor sits above what your market will pay. That is unwelcome and it is also the most valuable thing you will learn this year, and you learned it from a web page rather than from six months of calls.
Where I come out
Publish a floor. One sentence, one number, the smallest engagement you would genuinely take, on the page a prospect reads before they contact you.
You will lose some inquiries you would have enjoyed having. You will also stop hearing that sentence at minute forty, and get the hour back every time.
If you’d like to think through which format fits your own work, or what your floor should actually be, drop me a line on email, WhatsApp, phone or LinkedIn and we can have a quick chat, and my notes on getting marketing and sales pointed the same way cover what happens to the inquiries that survive. I’m taking on a small number of contracts at the moment, so I’ll tell you straight whether it’s something I could help with.