What this is, and who it is for
Ask a small operator why there are no prices on their website and you get a real answer, delivered quickly, because they have thought about it more than any other question on the site. The work varies. Competitors are watching. A number sets an anchor they cannot undo. Every project is different.
These are not excuses. They are accurate descriptions of a genuine problem, and advice that opens by dismissing them has already lost the argument.
This post takes them seriously, then points out the thing that gets lost in the anxiety: the choice is not between a full price list and nothing. There is a lot of ground in between, and most of it is safe. Five options live there.
A note on scope. This is about disclosure, not about what to charge. Nothing here suggests a price, a margin or a strategy. What you charge is your business and we have no view on it.
The objections, taken seriously
"My work varies too much." Often true. A joiner who fits a shelf and also builds a staircase has no single number. But "varies" is not the same as "unknowable". You know the smallest job you take. You know what a typical week's work costs. You know which jobs cost multiples of others. The variation is real and it is bounded, and stating the bounds is not the same as quoting.
"My competitors will see my prices." They will. They can also ring you and ask, send a friend to enquire, or read the quote you gave to a customer who then shopped around. Price secrecy in a small local market is mostly theatre. What is genuinely true is that publishing makes it effortless rather than merely easy, and that being visibly the more expensive option is uncomfortable in a way that being quietly more expensive is not. Weigh that honestly. For some businesses, in some markets, it is a reason to publish less. It is rarely a reason to publish nothing.
"A number becomes an anchor I can't move." This is the strongest objection, and the answer is to control the anchor rather than to leave it unset. If you say nothing, the visitor still forms a number. It comes from the last comparable thing they bought, from a competitor they saw earlier, or from what your website looks like. You have not avoided an anchor, you have only stopped choosing it.
"I'll get the wrong enquiries." You will get some. You are currently getting different wrong enquiries, from people who assume you are cheaper than you are, and you spend time on them before finding out. A floor number moves that discovery to before the conversation instead of after it.
What silence actually communicates to a stranger
Silence is not neutral. The visitor reads it, and they read it in one of two ways.
The first is "expensive". Not always wrong, and frequently not the message you wanted before someone had seen your work.
The second is worse: "they will quote based on me". The suspicion that the number depends on how the enquiry sounds, what area they are in, or how well-off they seem. Once a visitor holds that thought, the entire relationship is contaminated, and no amount of good work on the enquiry recovers it fully.
Both readings cost you enquiries you never hear about, from people who quietly leave. That is the difficulty with pricing silence: the cost is invisible, so there is never any evidence that it is happening.
We are not going to attach a figure to any of this. We have not measured it and we will not repeat a number we cannot source. What we can say plainly is that a price signal is one of the seven items on the seven-item floor, because without it a visitor cannot decide whether to start the conversation. It is also one of the things a buyer looks for when working out whether a business is real, which is covered from the other side in what a stranger checks before buying.
All five options below satisfy that floor item. You do not need a price list.
Option 1: a starting-from figure
The lowest price at which you will do the simplest version of the thing.
Invented example, for illustration only. A fictional picture framer writes: "Framing starts at [amount] for a standard A4 print in a ready-made frame. Larger sizes, non-standard shapes and conservation glass cost more."
What it does: it puts the visitor in the right order of magnitude and tells them the cheapest possible outcome. Someone whose budget is far below it leaves without either of you spending time. Someone above it now knows they are in the right shop.
What it costs: the "from" number becomes the number people remember, so it must be a job you will genuinely do at that price. A starting-from figure attached to a job you never actually accept is a trap you have set for yourself.
Best for work with a clear simplest case.
Option 2: a typical-project range with two worked examples
A band, plus two illustrations showing what sits at each end.
Invented example, for illustration only. A fictional freelance bookkeeper writes: "Most monthly clients pay between [lower] and [upper]. At the lower end: a sole trader, one bank account, under thirty transactions a month. At the upper end: a limited company with payroll for four people, two currencies and a stock system."
The range alone is nearly useless, because the visitor cannot tell which end is them. The two worked examples do all the work: they turn an abstract band into a self-assessment. People place themselves accurately and arrive at the enquiry already calibrated.
What it costs: writing the two examples honestly, which takes an hour and some self-knowledge. Also the discipline to update the band when it drifts, since a stale range is the same failure as a stale opening hour.
Best for service work with recognisable client types.
Option 3: the unit, without the total
Publish the rate and let the visitor do the arithmetic.
Invented example, for illustration only. A fictional decorator writes: "We charge [amount] per day for two decorators including materials for standard emulsion work. A typical three-bedroom house repaint is four to six days."
You have committed to nothing about their job. They can still estimate their own. The optional second sentence, giving a rough duration for a common case, is what makes this useful rather than merely transparent, since a day rate without any sense of duration leaves the visitor exactly where they started.
What it costs: some people will do the arithmetic and get a number that frightens them, when the same total delivered in conversation would have felt reasonable. That is a real trade and worth thinking about for high day rates on long jobs.
Best for time-based, materials-based or quantity-based work.
Option 4: what you don't do below
State your floor as a policy about job size rather than as a price.
Invented example, for illustration only. A fictional web developer writes: "Our smallest engagement is [amount]. Below that we are not the right people, and we are happy to point you towards someone who is."
This is the lowest-risk option on the list, which is why it is worth considering first if the others feel like too much exposure. You have revealed almost nothing about how you price anything. You have not anchored a project. You have only said where the door is.
It also does the largest share of the qualifying work, because the enquiries it deters are the ones that were never going to become work. Adding the referral sentence costs you nothing and means the person who leaves does so with something useful.
What it costs: very little. The main risk is publishing a floor you then breach for a friendly enquiry, which is fine occasionally and corrosive as a habit.
Best for anyone who cannot face any of the other four.
Option 5: the honest "it depends", done properly
"It depends" is not the problem. "Prices on application" with no further explanation is the problem, because it says nothing while pretending to say something.
Done properly means naming the variables and the direction each one moves the price.
Invented example, for illustration only. A fictional wedding photographer writes: "There is no standard price because four things change it: how many hours we are with you, whether there is a second photographer, travel and overnight stay, and whether you want an album. Hours and the second photographer are the two biggest. Most couples land somewhere between [lower] and [upper], and we will give you an exact figure within two days of hearing your date and venue."
Even without the band, the list of variables alone transforms the page. The visitor now knows what the conversation will be about and can prepare for it. They also understand that the number depends on the job rather than on them, which is precisely the suspicion that pricing silence creates.
What it costs: the honesty to name variables you might prefer to keep vague. If travel is a significant cost, saying so up front is better than surfacing it in a quote.
Best for genuinely bespoke work.
Choosing between them
Not a ranking, and no option here is better than the others in general.
| If this is true of you | Start with |
|---|---|
| There is a clear simplest job you do often | Option 1, starting-from |
| Your clients fall into recognisable types | Option 2, range plus two examples |
| You bill by time, quantity or material | Option 3, the unit |
| Every option above feels like too much | Option 4, the floor |
| The work is genuinely bespoke every time | Option 5, the variables |
Two practical notes.
They combine. A floor plus a list of variables is a strong page and is barely more exposure than the floor alone. A starting-from figure plus a typical range covers most of what a visitor wants.
Start smaller than feels right. Option 4 takes fifteen minutes and can be written today. If nothing bad happens, add a second element later. Nobody has to arrive at a full pricing page in one move, and an incremental approach means you find out what your market does with the information before you commit further.
Whatever you publish, put a review date against it in your own notes. A price page that quietly ages is the same maintenance failure as everything else on a small site, and it is the one most likely to cost you money directly.
In Plain English
Publishing nothing about price is itself a message, and it is usually read as "expensive" or "they will quote based on me". Neither is what you meant.
You do not need a price list to fix that. Five things work: the lowest price you start at, a typical range with two examples of who sits at each end, your unit rate, the smallest job you will take, or an honest explanation of what changes the number. Any one of them satisfies the price item on the seven-item floor.
If all of it feels like too much, publish the floor. "Our smallest job is [amount]" is fifteen minutes of work, commits you to almost nothing, and stops both of you wasting an afternoon.
Publishing prices is not a condition of being listed here, and it never will be. Our entry bar does not mention what you charge, and we do not comment on anyone's prices.
Get the shopfront checklist at free templates. The rest of this section is at shopfront basics, the wider findability craft is at being findable, and the stranger's ten-second test shows where a price signal sits among everything else a visitor is looking for.