"If I put the price up, they will compare me." "If I don't, nobody calls." Both sentences get said in the same meeting, sometimes by the same person. Whether to show prices on your website does have an answer, but it is not a yes or a no: it depends on what you sell and, above all, on what you do when you cannot give a fixed figure.
What actually happens when you hide the price
Somebody looking for a service online opens three or four tabs. In each one they are after the same thing: a sense of the order of magnitude. If they cannot find it on yours, they do not think "how intriguing, I will ask". They move to the next tab.
The ones who do write tend to arrive with the same question —"how much is it?"— and a share of them drop out the moment you answer, because they were never in your range. That work of quoting jobs that were going nowhere is paid for in your hours.
And there is a third, quieter effect: without a price, your page has nothing concrete to say. Not to the search engine and not to AI answers, which cite what they can verify. A text with no figures is interchangeable with any competitor's.
When to publish them without hesitating
- You sell something with a fixed price: products, monthly fees, sessions, menus, tickets. Hiding it here only creates friction.
- Your competitors charge something similar and you compete on service, not on being cheapest. Publishing filters out whoever is only after the lowest price.
- You get lots of enquiries that never close. If you spend the week explaining rates on the phone, the site is sending you the wrong people.
- You are more expensive than average and you know why. Writing it down with the reason next to it saves you the awkward conversation and attracts whoever wants exactly that.
When a fixed price is not the point
There are businesses where an exact figure would be a lie: a renovation, custom development, a legal case, a building job. The opposite mistake exists there too —publishing a "from 500 €" that looks like no real invoice ends in angry customers—.
But "I cannot give a fixed price" is not the same as "I say nothing". You can almost always give three things:
- An honest range with cases: "a full bathroom renovation usually runs between X and Y depending on size and finishes".
- What it depends on, in four points. That is what people actually want to understand.
- The price of the first visit or the survey, even if it is free. Knowing that asking costs nothing is useful information.
Four ways to show it, depending on the business
Fixed rate
One figure per product or plan. The simplest, and what works best for recurring services. That is how we do it: our prices are published —100 € a month for the one-page landing, 200 € for the site with up to ten subpages, and 400, 750 and 1,500 € for the plans with articles, Google profile, campaigns and social media— with what each one includes.
From X
Useful when there are variants, on one condition: that "from" has to be a job you genuinely sell at that price. If nobody has ever bought at that figure, it is bait and it shows.
A range
"Between X and Y". The best option for building work, renovations and projects. It gives the order of magnitude without committing you to a number you cannot stand behind.
Price per unit
Per hour, per square metre, per person, per page. It makes clear how the total is worked out, which often matters more than the total itself.
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Where to put them so they get seen
A prices page of its own, linked from the menu, plus the figure repeated inside each service page. Plenty of people land straight on "bathroom renovation" from Google and never touch the menu: if the price only lives on a separate page, for that person it does not exist.
If you sell products, it is also worth marking them up with Google's product structured data, so price and availability can appear in the search results themselves. It is invisible technical work, but it changes how you show up.
Inside the prices page
Almost every one that works has the same skeleton, in this order:
- The figure right at the top, with no introductory paragraph in front of it. Whoever lands there already knows what they want.
- What is included, as a list and in recognisable terms. "Support" says nothing; "we reply within 24 working hours" does.
- What is not included. The part almost nobody writes and the one that builds the most trust, because it heads off the argument in month three.
- The usual doubts, answered right there: minimum term, payment methods, what happens if I want to leave, whether there is a setup fee.
- A contact button next to each option, not only at the foot of the page.
And one test before publishing it: give it to somebody outside your industry and ask them to tell you what their case would cost. If they cannot answer, information is still missing.
What to write next to the number
A price on its own raises more questions than it answers. The boring part has to sit beside it:
- Whether VAT is included or not.
- What is in and what is not, with concrete names.
- Whether there is a minimum term, and how long.
- What happens the following year, if the first has different conditions.
This is not just courtesy: when selling to consumers, information about the price and its conditions has to be clear before they commit, and Spain's Ministry of Consumer Affairs publishes material on what a customer should know before buying. Writing it properly avoids complaints and, incidentally, signals that there is no small print.
"But competitors will copy my prices"
They will copy them anyway. Any competitor can request a quote posing as a customer and have it in two days; hiding them on the site only makes life difficult for the person who wants to buy from you.
The useful question is a different one: if price is the only thing that sets you apart, the problem is not the website. When there are reasons to choose you —timings, guarantee, who does the work, cases like theirs— price stops being the only thing compared, and that gets written down too.
What to check after publishing them
Give it a couple of months and compare three things against what you had before:
- How many enquiries come in. The number usually drops.
- How many become customers. The proportion usually rises.
- How much time you spend quoting. That is where it shows most.
Fewer enquiries and more customers is a good trade, even if the first month is unnerving. If the opposite happens —enquiries fall and nothing rises— it is almost always because the price is standing there alone, without the context that justifies it.
How we do it
We publish our figures because it saves both sides time: whoever writes already knows the range and the conversation starts with what they need, not with money. Excluding VAT, no lock-in, and with website and email migration included.
What we do not publish is custom software, process automation and AI audits: those are quoted per project, because the price depends on what has to be built and a fixed rate would be made up. There we give a range and explain what it depends on, which is exactly what this article recommends.
If you are weighing up whether to show yours, message us on WhatsApp telling us what you do and what people ask you on the phone. We will tell you which format fits and how to write it. No strings, same day.
Tell us what you need and we'll give you a price
We reply the same day. No commitment, no sales pitch.