Ask a room of service business owners whether they publish prices and most say no, for the same three reasons: every project is different, competitors will undercut, and a number might scare people off before the discovery call. Reasonable fears, all three. And in most cases publishing wins anyway, because the fears price in the wrong direction.
What the silence actually costs
Put yourself on the visitor’s side of a site with no prices. You cannot tell if this business is in your budget, so contacting them means volunteering for a sales conversation just to learn a number. Some visitors do it. Most quietly leave for a competitor who answered, and the ones who do write include everyone for whom your price will be a bad surprise.
Missing prices also read as a signal. Visitors routinely interpret them as “expensive”, or as “the price depends on what they think I can pay”, neither of which builds the trust you were hoping the call would build. The silence does not feel neutral from the outside; uncertainty defaults to no.
And there is a newer cost: people now ask ChatGPT and Perplexity what services cost, and assistants answer from sources that publish numbers. A site with no prices simply cannot be quoted in those answers. The businesses that publish become the reference points, the same mechanism by which assistants pick every source.
What publishing filters
The fear of scaring people off has it backwards. The visitors scared off by your real price were never going to buy at it; publishing merely moves that discovery from a call you paid for with an hour to a page that works free. What arrives instead is fewer, warmer enquiries from people who saw the number and wrote anyway. Ask anyone who made the switch what changed and they name the same thing first: the bad-fit calls stopped.
The undercutting fear assumes clients buy on price alone, which is true only of clients you do not want. A competitor can already get your quote by asking. Meanwhile the price-shaped hole in your site pushes away the good-fit buyers who just wanted to know they were in the right range.
”Every project is different” has a solution
You do not need a menu with exact totals; you need to answer the real question, which is “roughly what does this cost?” Starting prices do it: “websites from 2,500 CAD” is honest, useful and safe. Tiers do it better, packaging typical scopes at typical numbers, and they quietly anchor: a visible middle option makes the decision “which one”, not “whether”. Always show any recurring option, because a client who plans for ongoing care was told the truth from the start. This is exactly how my own pricing is structured: three ways to work together, a starting number on each, details after a conversation.
The one honest exception: if your work genuinely cannot be scoped below a wide range, publish the floor and say what moves the number. “Engagements start at X; scope drives the rest” still beats silence, because it answers the budget question without pretending precision you do not have.
Making the page itself work
State what each number includes, in plain words, so the price arrives attached to value rather than floating alone. Put the price near the proof: a number next to a testimonial or a case study reads as an investment with evidence; the same number alone reads as a cost. End the page with a low-commitment next step, since a pricing page is where the “this might be for me” decision happens and the visitor should not have to hunt for what to do about it. And keep it honest: a “from” price that no real project has ever landed near is a trust signal in reverse, and visitors find out.
I publish my prices, so you can judge the argument by its own demonstration on the services page. And if your website is losing enquiries somewhere between arrival and contact, pricing included, the free audit will locate the leak.