Prices on your website: show them or hide them

This is one of the few questions where business owners split exactly in half and both sides are sure they are right. The argument against prices: "they will learn the sum and leave". The argument for: "they will not learn the sum and leave anyway". Let me work through when each side is right.

Why does the question about prices come up at all?

Because behind the silence there is almost always fear, not strategy.

There are three fears: competitors will see the price and undercut it, the client will be scared by the sum, the price depends on the project and any figure will be inaccurate. The first two are weak: competitors learn your price with one phone call, and a client scared by the sum would not have bought anyway. The third fear is real, and that is the one to work with.

The right question is not "show them or not", it is "what exactly can I say honestly".

What happens when prices are hidden?

Someone looking for a service opens several sites in a row. Where prices are there, the person gets an answer. Where they are not, the person has to write and wait. Some people write. Most close the tab.

The second effect is worse and not visible straight away: leads that arrive without prices are junkier. When a person has no sense of the order of the sum, you also hear from those counting on many times less. The manager burns energy on conversations that end in nothing, while you see "plenty of leads" and cannot work out why there are no sales.

The absence of a price moves the filtering work off the site and onto a person. Sometimes that is justified, more often it is not. On the other reasons leads do not convert: Why Your Website Gets No Leads.

When is hiding prices justified?

There are two cases where it is a workable position.

The price is determined entirely by volume. Construction, manufacturing, complex rollouts. Here any figure without the inputs is misleading, and explaining the structure of the calculation is more honest than naming a sum. How construction sites handle it: Website for a construction company.

Large negotiated deals. If the sale runs through meetings and bargaining, a public price ties your hands and devalues the negotiation.

Everything else is not a reason. "We have an individual approach" is not a reason: everyone has an individual approach, and a range can be named almost always.

How do you show prices when you have no exact sum?

Between an exact figure and silence there are four intermediate formats, and they cover almost every case.

A floor price. "From such and such a sum", with an explanation of what that minimum includes. The simplest and the most honest option.

A range. A lower and an upper bound plus a list of what moves the price inside the bracket.

A price per unit. Per meter, per hour, per item, per user - wherever that is the natural unit of measure.

Examples of real orders. Not a price list, but a few typical cases: this job cost that much, because of this and this.

The last format is underrated and it is the strongest: it names the order of the sum, shows experience and explains the logic of the pricing all at once.

What do you write instead of "price on request"?

The wording itself is not frightening. What is frightening is when there is nothing behind it. "Price on request" with not a single word beside it reads as "expensive, and we would rather not talk about it".

The minimum that turns it into something workable:

What the price depends on - three or four factors, concretely.

What you need from the client to calculate it - which inputs you will ask for.

How quickly they get an answer - not a deadline in figures, but a clear order of steps.

I keep my own prices in plain sight for exactly this reason: a landing page from $190, a multipage website from $490, a complex project - on request. The third line is on request as well, but standing next to two concrete ones it reads as a boundary of applicability, not as evasion. What the price is made of: How much does a website cost in Tashkent.

How do prices affect search and AI answers?

This part usually goes unconsidered, and it is a noticeable one.

A page with prices answers a search query carrying the words "how much does it cost" and "price" - and those are the most commercial queries there are. Without figures on the page there is almost nothing to get into that result with.

The second thing is AI search. When an assistant answers a question about the cost of a service, it assembles the answer from pages where the sum is written as text. A site without prices does not get into that answer, and competitors do. There is a trap right here: a price baked into an image or a PDF does not exist for a machine. A price list has to be text on the page.

Which option is right for you?

A short test. If you can name the sum below which you do not take on work, write that down. It is already more than most of your competitors have, and it filters out the wrong clients before the conversation.

If you cannot name even a minimum, describe the structure of the price and what you need in order to calculate it. That is not the same thing as silence.

And if the price is hidden out of fear that the client will leave, it is worth testing the opposite hypothesis: perhaps they leave precisely because they did not find it.

If you want to work through how to present prices in your niche, write to me through the form on the contact page.