Should your prices be public?

[EdoardoZangi]

Relatively new here, I hope this topic is valuable and within the scope of the forum.

I've been freelancing on the side, mixing music online for about a year. B2C creative services.

Being my first business experience, I consumed every podcast, book and video I could access. I've always heard this specific advice repeated over and over: hide your prices from the public and opt for a quote-based system.

Some of the supposed advantages of the quote-based system would be:

• Better pre-selection of the clientele.
• More flexibility to adjust your pricing to the demand.
• Possibility of creating ad-hoc packages tailored to the specific needs of each client.

I didn't know better, so I accepted it as truth and moved on.


Long story short, I'm now at the point where I'm starting to question this method. The whole enquiring process seems to add unnecessary friction, doubt and potentially scare people away.

Is it possible I'm repelling good leads just to blindly 'conform' to the industry's best practices?
Would I benefit from - let's say - an e-commerce style checkout, but for services?
What are the arguments in favour of public pricing for services?

I've recently seen more and more B2B service providers publish their prices and packages on their websites.
What do y'all think?

 

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[Lex DeVille]

Relatively new here, I hope this topic is valuable and within the scope of the forum.

I've been freelancing on the side, mixing music online for about a year. B2C creative services.

Being my first business experience, I consumed every podcast, book and video I could access. I've always heard this specific advice repeated over and over: hide your prices from the public and opt for a quote-based system.

Some of the supposed advantages of the quote-based system would be:

• Better pre-selection of the clientele.
• More flexibility to adjust your pricing to the demand.
• Possibility of creating ad-hoc packages tailored to the specific needs of each client.

I didn't know better, so I accepted it as truth and moved on.


Long story short, I'm now at the point where I'm starting to question this method. The whole enquiring process seems to add unnecessary friction, doubt and potentially scare people away.

Is it possible I'm repelling good leads just to blindly 'conform' to the industry's best practices?
Would I benefit from - let's say - an e-commerce style checkout, but for services?
What are the arguments in favour of public pricing for services?

I've recently seen more and more B2B service providers publish their prices and packages on their websites.
What do y'all think?

If you publish your prices, then you only attract people who can afford to pay those prices and who are willing to pay those prices. That saves you time, effort, and energy by avoiding people who aren't a good fit.

An alternative could be to share a minimum price or a range of prices.

• Prices starting at $xxxx
• Prices ranging from $xxx - $xxxxxx

That cuts out anyone who isn't fit because they can't afford you and leaves open the option to tailor pricing to the individual based on their needs.

 

[Stargazer]

Nothing wrong with either having your actual prices for online sign up or a range/from price if your service is more tailored.

Amazon show the exact price as it's a straight transaction

Range Rover Dealership would show from £xyz as how are they supposed to know what you want?

Dan

 

[Stargazer]

LOL. What Lex wrote as I was writing.

 

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[EdoardoZangi]

If you publish your prices, then you only attract people who can afford to pay those prices and who are willing to pay those prices. That saves you time, effort, and energy by avoiding people who aren't a good fit.

An alternative could be to share a minimum price or a range of prices.

• Prices starting at $xxxx
• Prices ranging from $xxx - $xxxxxx

That cuts out anyone who isn't fit because they can't afford you and leaves open the option to tailor pricing to the individual based on their needs.

Nothing wrong with either having your actual prices for online sign up or a range/from price if your service is more tailored.

Amazon show the exact price as it's a straight transaction

Range Rover Dealership would show from £xyz as how are they supposed to know what you want?

Dan

Thank you both for the great advice! I'll keep experimenting on this.

 

[Fox]

Relatively new here, I hope this topic is valuable and within the scope of the forum.

I've been freelancing on the side, mixing music online for about a year. B2C creative services.

Being my first business experience, I consumed every podcast, book and video I could access. I've always heard this specific advice repeated over and over: hide your prices from the public and opt for a quote-based system.

Some of the supposed advantages of the quote-based system would be:

• Better pre-selection of the clientele.
• More flexibility to adjust your pricing to the demand.
• Possibility of creating ad-hoc packages tailored to the specific needs of each client.

I didn't know better, so I accepted it as truth and moved on.


Long story short, I'm now at the point where I'm starting to question this method. The whole enquiring process seems to add unnecessary friction, doubt and potentially scare people away.

Is it possible I'm repelling good leads just to blindly 'conform' to the industry's best practices?
Would I benefit from - let's say - an e-commerce style checkout, but for services?
What are the arguments in favour of public pricing for services?

I've recently seen more and more B2B service providers publish their prices and packages on their websites.
What do y'all think?

No wrong approach, each has pros and cons...

Showing Prices:
- removes time wasters
- allows you to focus on a systemised consistent offer
- you can focus more on addressing other pain points and concerns

Not showing prices:
- can adjust prices to match the budget and needs of a client
- can build up the potential value first, then close at a higher price
- allows you to build some rapport first before exploring the budget

I would say a main deciding factor is how streamline and scalable you want to make things.
If you want to ramp up the number of clients then custom prices can slow everything down.

But if you're looking to work with just a few clients, then custom prices allow you to max the potential of every deal.

 

[Andy Black]

I don't even have a "proper" website, never mind showing / not showing prices.

My advice is to not take other people's advice as gospel.

 

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[Jérémy de HelpIn]

The usual advice is that you should put your prices available on your website. It shows transparency, confidence and indeed, if you have a lot of leads, it filters them for you.

Now, not having your prices makes the lead contact you to learn about your offer. So you can build stronger connection, answer their questions personnally, make suggestions etc...

It all depends about what you're selling and what your time is worth. An all automated checkout is great but sometimes a more "human" approach has other advantages.

 

[Xeon]

When I visit a website or a freelancer's portfolio and they don't publish any prices but says to contact them for prices, or in the case of SaaS products that asks for the phone number/email so they can schedule a call/appointment/demo, I immediately search for alternatives.

Because I know that the prices will be out of my reach (it's too high and they're scared of scaring people away by putting it on the site).

If they put the prices on the site AND the prices are out of my reach, I would at least save the site in my bookmarks just in case.

Non-transparency is a huge turn off.

 

[bpbrewer]

Although there's a place for it in certain markets, hiding the price is a bit of an old-school way of thinking and probably founded more on fear than a best practice. The argument I keep hearing is that you're advertising prices to your competitors so they can undercut you, and also pigeonholes you to that price without room for increase, and opens the door to direct communication with "prospects" before they're scared away by the price.

However, I argue that nothing scares away a potential customer faster than ambiguity. And an ambiguous price is the fastest way to ensure that a qualified prospect never reaches out.

When a prospect sees "Contact for a quote", it usually communicates to them: "this dude will try to charge me whatever they think I'm worth", and/or "I'm going to have to negotiate the price", and/or "I'm going to waste my time contacting a pesky salesperson to even find out if this is for me". Neither is what the prospect wants to deal with.

As you've said, publishing price, price range, or price ballpark, gives your customers a point of reference and weeds out the tire kickers who are not willing to pay your price. It also communicates that you're honest and transparent: everyone gets this price, not just them.

Price is a powerful marketing tool. You can use it to attract the customers you want and weed out the ones you don't.

People often perceive the quality of a product or service based on price alone. The customer who's looking for quality understands that it will cost a little more. This customer will usually steer away from the lowest price because they perceive low quality.

So, a point of advice, don't be the cheapest. The customer who's looking for the absolute cheapest price is usually the customer you do not want to work with. They're the most difficult. You also won't feel the need to fight a price war with your competitors.

 

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[BizyDad]

No wrong approach, each has pros and cons...

Showing Prices:
- removes time wasters
- allows you to focus on a systemised consistent offer
- you can focus more on addressing other pain points and concerns

Not showing prices:
- can adjust prices to match the budget and needs of a client
- can build up the potential value first, then close at a higher price
- allows you to build some rapport first before exploring the budget

I would say a main deciding factor is how streamline and scalable you want to make things.
If you want to ramp up the number of clients then custom prices can slow everything down.

But if you're looking to work with just a few clients, then custom prices allow you to max the potential of every deal.

Agree with this.

Often, for my clients, we start off with no prices. If forces people to reach out, gives us a chance to close the sale that way.

From an SEO standpoint, it keeps people on your website longer too.

But then once they're an established brand, or they get too busy, occasionally then we put prices on. Phone calls was slow, but our manageable.

I'm speaking from the perspective of service businesses.

Another big factor in all of this is what is your competition doing? If people are price shopping, and most of your competition lists their prices, people aren't going to ask you for a quote. So in this case, if you can't beat them, join them.

But I usually don't recommend my clients to be the first one in the industry to list prices. Unless they are confident they can be the low cost leader. For some people, that's their business model. But wants someone list prices, eventually then everybody does, and then you get everybody trying to drive down the price over the course of a few years.

Whichever way you choose, you can always switch back. Test both. Hope that helps.

 

[violinista]

Relatively new here, I hope this topic is valuable and within the scope of the forum.

I've been freelancing on the side, mixing music online for about a year. B2C creative services.

Being my first business experience, I consumed every podcast, book and video I could access. I've always heard this specific advice repeated over and over: hide your prices from the public and opt for a quote-based system.

Some of the supposed advantages of the quote-based system would be:

• Better pre-selection of the clientele.
• More flexibility to adjust your pricing to the demand.
• Possibility of creating ad-hoc packages tailored to the specific needs of each client.

I didn't know better, so I accepted it as truth and moved on.


Long story short, I'm now at the point where I'm starting to question this method. The whole enquiring process seems to add unnecessary friction, doubt and potentially scare people away.

Is it possible I'm repelling good leads just to blindly 'conform' to the industry's best practices?
Would I benefit from - let's say - an e-commerce style checkout, but for services?
What are the arguments in favour of public pricing for services?

I've recently seen more and more B2B service providers publish their prices and packages on their websites.
What do y'all think?

Really great question, and there are already really great answers on here! I too am working on making pricing transparent... yet customized yet quote-based yet frictionless for my business and was wondering the same thing (and it's not quite a straightforward answer, lol).

For my industry (also music), I've noticed many businesses don't openly publish their pricing, since it's variable based on the specific event. I don't have the experience to give you advice for public pricing for services, but I can tell you what I'm going to test out for my business and my reasoning for it.

Scenario: Customer reaches out and they're interested in hiring us! But it's not so simple...
- In my case, not only is it actually very necessary to educate the customer (sometimes they really don't know what they want or are shy about not knowing much about music in the first place), but to be transparent with pricing and give them a seamless/easy way to decide and to book.
- I'm sure people are already so stressed about planning their event, and the music should be the fun part - not just the performance/sound, but also the booking process so that they're excited about it and not worried about being nickeled and dimed, lol

I do know that I want to have some established, easy-to-send baseline pricing, as mentioned above, to send to the individual potential client. I also want to make the back-and-forth dialogue as efficient as possible/remove friction from the booking, but dialogue is also necessary. I don't think I'll make my pricing public on the website because it really does drive pricing down in my area, and then it's a competition to the bottom, as they say. I would rather advertise that we have plenty of reasons to book us (ease of booking, reliability, reviews, high quality music/musicians, etc.), and once they reach out, then being transparent that prices begin "here" but can change depending on the unique situation (mileage, song requests, etc.). It will be interesting to see how that approach goes!

 

[Guest-5ty5s4]

There is not one right or wrong answer. Lots of industrial companies quote custom orders and make tons of money that way. These could be project-based companies that build things, or product-based companies that sell very specific widgets that you can only get from certain vendors. In both cases, they are not showing their prices in a catalog or on a website, and oftentimes, they charge more when the buyer needs the item or service in an emergency.

Of course, if the business fails to perform, you can just as easily lose money with any approach.

 

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[mijustin]

As a general rule of thumb:

• If your product/service is self-serve (like a web application) or for consumers, prosumers, or SMBs, it's best to publish your prices on your website
• If your product/service is for enterprise customers, "Call for a quote" or "Request a quote" is normal.