Show prices on your website or not? A decision aid
Showing prices lowers the number of enquiries and raises their quality. Whether that is good depends on which problem you have: too few enquiries, or too many unsuitable ones. That question decides it — not what is customary in your industry.
In short
- Showing prices lowers enquiry volume and raises quality. If you have too few enquiries, be careful with it.
- There are three middle options: a from-price, a range, or the method of pricing with no figure.
- Saying nothing at all is the worst option — it creates the assumption that it is expensive.
- For answer engines, a stated range nearly always beats silence: what is not there cannot be quoted.
The question usually gets answered by industry custom: "in our field nobody shows prices." That is not a reason but an observation — and often the reason a stated price stands out in exactly that field.
The four questions
1. What is your bottleneck?
Too few enquiries, or too many unsuitable ones? Showing prices reliably shifts things towards fewer and better-matched. If you already have too few, you are making your problem worse.
2. How much does your price vary?
If the same job can cost anywhere between 2,000 and 60,000, one figure is misleading. The method is then the more honest statement: what drives the price and in what steps.
3. What does an unsuitable enquiry cost you?
With a twenty-minute clarifying call it barely registers. With a half-day site visit and a written quote, ten unsuitable enquiries a month is a substantial item.
4. Is your price your position?
If you are deliberately cheaper or deliberately more expensive than the market, staying silent throws away a distinguishing feature. If you sit in the middle, showing it gains you less.
The five variants
| Variant | Effect on volume | Effect on quality | Suits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full price list | falls sharply | rises sharply | a standardised offering |
| From-price ("from 4,900") | falls | rises | a clear entry package |
| Range ("4,900 to 18,000") | falls slightly | rises | most service businesses |
| Method with no figure | unchanged | rises slightly | widely varying scope |
| No statement | unchanged to falling | falls | almost nothing |
Worth knowing
The last row surprises many: saying nothing often lowers enquiry volume too — just invisibly. Some visitors conclude from the absence of a figure that it will be expensive, and do not enquire.
Those non-enquiries appear in no statistic. You only see the enquiries that arrive — and wrongly conclude that silence does not affect volume. That is why "no statement" is nearly always worse than the weakest middle option, which is explaining the method.
The middle option that nearly always works
If a figure really is impossible, the method remains. It answers the visitor's actual question — "am I in the right place at all?" — without stating a figure that is not true.
A usable method section contains four things:
- What drives the price. Scope, number of locations, urgency, number of languages — the two or three quantities that actually make the difference.
- What order of magnitude it moves in. Even without an exact figure: "in the four-figure range for individual measures, in the mid five figures for full rebuilds".
- How a quote comes about. How many conversations, how long it takes, whether producing it costs anything.
- Who it is not for. The most effective sentence of all — it saves both sides time and reads more credibly than any self-description.
The most effective sentence on a pricing page is nearly always the exclusion: "For projects under 3,000 we are not the right choice — for those we would suggest X."
It costs you the enquiries that would not have become jobs anyway, and it raises trust among the ones that fit: someone who says who they are not suitable for gets taken seriously on the rest. In its effect on enquiry quality, that single sentence usually beats the entire rest of the pricing page.
The point that is new
Answer engines change the calculation. When someone asks "what does X cost in Switzerland", an answer gets built from the sources that state something. Say nothing and you do not appear in it.
That holds regardless of how good your page is otherwise: a question about cost cannot be answered from a page with no cost information. For providers who want to be found through search engines and AI answers, that shifts the balance noticeably towards stating a range.
Help me decide whether and how we should show prices on our website. Our situation: - What we offer: [offering] - Price range for typical jobs: [from / to] - What drives the price: [two or three factors] - Enquiries per month: [number] - Of those, unsuitable: [number or estimate] - Time spent per unsuitable enquiry: [details] - Our bottleneck: [too few enquiries / too many unsuitable] - Are we cheap, mid-range or expensive for our market? [details] Tasks: 1. Answer the four decision questions for our case: bottleneck, price variation, cost of an unsuitable enquiry, price as position. 2. Recommend one of the five variants – price list, from-price, range, method with no figure, no statement – and justify it. 3. Draft the pricing section in our chosen variant. Use only the figures I gave above. 4. Phrase an exclusion sentence: who we are not the right choice for. 5. Tell me what will probably shift in enquiry volume and quality as a result, and how we would tell after three months whether it was the right decision. Do not invent prices or market comparisons.
In closing
The decision hangs on the bottleneck: if you have too few enquiries, do not build a barrier. If you have too many unsuitable ones, a figure gains you more than it costs.
In both cases silence is the worst option — it lowers volume invisibly and makes your own page useless for cost questions. A range with reasoning is the right compromise for most service businesses, and the exclusion sentence does more than anything else on the page.
Common questions
Should you show prices on your website?
It depends on the bottleneck. Showing prices lowers enquiry volume and raises quality — so it helps if you have too many unsuitable enquiries and hurts if you have too few. Saying nothing at all, however, is nearly always the worst variant.
What if the price varies a lot?
Then the method is the more honest statement: what drives the price, what orders of magnitude it moves in, how a quote comes about, and who it is not for. Those four answer the visitor's actual question — "am I in the right place?" — without stating a figure that is not true.
Why is silence worse than a range?
Because some visitors conclude from the absence of a figure that it will be expensive and do not enquire at all. Those non-enquiries appear in no statistic — you only see what arrives, which is why silence wrongly looks consequence-free.
How do price statements affect AI answers?
Considerably. When someone asks what a service costs, the answer gets built from sources that state something. A page with no cost information cannot answer that question and does not appear in the answer — which shifts the balance noticeably towards stating a range.
What is the most effective sentence on a pricing page?
The exclusion: who you are not the right choice for, ideally with a suggestion of where those enquiries could go instead. It only costs enquiries that would not have become jobs anyway, and raises trust among the ones that do fit.
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