Why my prices are on my website.

Go look at ten web design agency sites right now. Count how many of them list an actual price.

It'll be one. Maybe zero.

Most of them have a "Pricing" link in the nav, and most of those links go to a page that says every project is unique, so we build a custom quote for every client. Then a form.

My numbers are on my site. A one-page site is $800. A four-page site is $1,500, and each page past that is $250. Care plans start at $50 a month. A logo starts at $750. They're sitting right there on the services page where anybody can read them, including the two other guys in Jacksonville quoting the same job. You can even build a ballpark estimate without talking to me. The estimate is a starting point; I confirm the price in writing before any work starts.

People ask me why I'd do that. Usually the real question underneath it is aren't you leaving money on the table?

Maybe some. Here's what I think the alternative costs.

"Every project is unique" is true and beside the point

Every project is different. Mine are. A four-page site for an HVAC company with decent photos and a written-down brand is not the same job as a four-page site for a landscaper with forty phone pictures in a Drive folder and a logo that only exists as a screenshot of a truck door.

That's why I still quote each one.

But "I can't tell you the exact price" and "I can't tell you any price" are not the same sentence. They get treated like the same sentence constantly. They're not close.

You know your floor. You know what your smallest realistic project costs, because you've done thirty of them. Publish that. "Sites start at $800." Nobody reads a starting-at number and thinks they've been handed a binding quote. They read it to decide whether to keep scrolling.

What hiding the number does

Here's the part that doesn't get said out loud: hiding the price isn't a service to the client. It's a sales tactic.

The logic runs like this. If I can get you on a call before you know the number, I've got thirty minutes to build enough rapport and show enough expertise that the number lands softer than it would have on a cold web page. Salespeople call it anchoring on value instead of price. It works. It's a legitimate technique and I understand why agencies use it.

But look at what it requires to function. It requires that you not know what things cost until you've already spent an hour of your life in a discovery call. It requires that you be, in a small way, in the dark. That's the mechanism. Turn the lights on and the tactic stops working.

I'd rather not build my whole intake process on something that only works when the other person is under-informed.

The filter cuts both ways

Published prices don't get you more inquiries. They get you different ones.

The person with $400 who needs a website reads $800 and doesn't fill out the form. That's not a lost sale. That was never a sale. In the hidden-price version it's two emails, a phone call, a written proposal, and a polite no three weeks later — a bad afternoon for both of us that we could have skipped in four seconds.

It runs the other direction too. Say somebody just got quoted $9,000 by an agency for a five-page site. They read my numbers and show up with a good question: what's the difference? That's a conversation I'm glad to have. Sometimes the honest answer is that the agency's $9,000 includes things I don't do, and I'll say so.

Either way the number did the sorting before either of us spent an hour on it.

A price is an argument for your work, not against it

The fear underneath price-hiding is that the number will scare people off. Sometimes it will. But a published price does one thing a hidden one can't: it proves you've thought about it.

A business that can say "$1,500, four pages, and here's exactly what's in it" is a business that has done this enough times to know. A business that can only say "let's hop on a call real quick" might be doing the math from scratch every single time. Clients can feel that difference even when they can't name it.

Certainty is part of what people are buying. Especially from a one-person shop. I'm asking somebody to hand real money to a guy they found on Google, and everything I can do to make that feel less like a leap is worth doing. A number on a page is the cheapest one available to me.

If you sell services and your prices are hidden

You don't have to publish a full rate card. Try this instead.

Publish a floor. "Projects start at $X." One sentence.

Then publish what's included at that floor — not adjectives, actual line items. How many pages, how many rounds of revisions, roughly how long it takes, what happens after it launches.

Then publish what isn't included. The three things you always get asked for that cost extra. Say it now instead of in the awkward third email.

That's the whole change. It takes an afternoon. It'll do more for your intake than another rewrite of your homepage headline.

The reason most businesses skip it isn't that it doesn't work. It's that it's uncomfortable to be the first one in your industry with the number on the page.

Somebody has to be. Might as well be the person who wants the right clients anyway.

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My prices are on the services page, and they're the real ones. If you want to know what your project would actually run, tell me what you're trying to build and I'll give you a straight answer.