Should you publish your prices?

What hiding prices actually costs

It does not create curiosity. It creates a closed tab. Somebody comparing three businesses will generally rule out the one that makes them ring to find out whether they can afford it.

It also fills your day with enquiries from people whose budget was never going to reach, which is the expensive part — not the lost sale, but the hour spent finding out.

What publishing prices actually costs

You will get fewer enquiries. That is real and it frightens people. What you will not get is fewer jobs, because the enquiries you lose are overwhelmingly the ones that were never going to convert.

Competitors seeing your prices matters far less than people fear. They can ring and ask, and mostly they already know.

The middle path that works

Publish a range with the conditions attached. 'Most full bathroom installations we do come in between €7,000 and €12,000 depending on the suite and whether the layout changes.'

That tells somebody with €3,000 to look elsewhere, tells somebody with €10,000 that they are in the right place, and commits you to nothing.

• —A from-price for the simplest version of the job
• —A typical range for the common case
• —What moves the price up or down
• —What is always included
• —What is never included

Where it does not apply

Genuinely bespoke work where the range is so wide that a number misleads more than it helps. Commercial and B2B work priced per contract. Anything where the specification changes the cost by an order of magnitude.

Even then, saying 'projects typically start at X' does more good than saying nothing.

The test

Count how many quotes you did last month and how many became jobs. If the ratio is poor, you have a filtering problem, and price transparency is the cheapest filter available.

If the ratio is good and you are short of work, keep the prices off and get more enquiries first.