Should You Publish Your Prices?

This is the question I get asked most often and the one people most want a yes or no to.

The real answer: publish something. Not necessarily a price list, but something, because the alternative is making every single person ring you to find out whether they can afford you, and most of them will not bother.

What happens when you publish nothing

Three things, and only one of them is good.

You get more enquiries. True, and this is the whole argument for saying nothing.

A large share of them cannot afford you. You spend time quoting, driving, and writing up jobs for people who were always going to go with somebody half your rate. That time is not free.

The careful buyers go elsewhere. This is the cost nobody counts. Plenty of people will not ring a business that will not indicate a price, because they have been caught before. You never hear from them, so you never know, and you conclude the strategy is working.

What happens when you publish

Fewer enquiries, better ones.

That is the trade, honestly stated. Anybody who tells you publishing prices increases enquiry volume is guessing. It usually reduces it, and that is the point: the people who drop out are the ones who were going to drop out later, after you had done the work of quoting.

So the question is not whether publishing costs you enquiries. It is whether your actual problem is too few enquiries or too many of the wrong ones. If you are quiet, keep the gate open. If you are quoting all evening and winning a third, close it a bit.

What to publish when every job is different

This is the real objection and it is a fair one. A drainage job can be eighty dollars or eight thousand.

So do not publish a list. Publish a floor, which is all anybody actually needs to self-select.

• A callout fee. What it costs for you to turn up, and what that includes.
• An hourly or half-day rate. With whether materials are on top.
• A minimum charge. Honest and clarifying.
• A from price per common job type. With a plain sentence on what moves it up.
• A worked example. One real job, what it involved, what it cost. More persuasive than any range.

That is enough. Somebody reading it can work out whether they are in the right shop. Nobody can hold you to a number you did not give.

Say what moves the price

The thing that makes a from price feel like a trick is when the final figure is a multiple of it with no explanation.

Fix it with one sentence. Access, age of the property, whether the old unit has to come out, whether the floor has to come up, whether it is out of hours. People are not unreasonable about price. They are unreasonable about surprises.

This is also where you head off the enquiries you do not want. "From 450 for a standard replacement, and considerably more if the pipework needs rerouting" does more filtering than a page of terms.

The search argument

Price is one of the most searched things about any trade. People type it constantly.

A page that answers it honestly can be found for those searches. A page that says contact us for a competitive quote cannot be found for anything, and it cannot be quoted by an AI answer either, which increasingly matters: engines lift specific, self-contained statements, and a refusal to answer is not liftable. That is the practical side of what GEO is and how you actually do it, and price is the clearest case of why an AI cites a competitor's page instead of yours: theirs answers the question, yours asks for a phone call.

What I do, for what it is worth

Every price for my own work is on my pricing page, in five currencies, with no form in front of it.

It loses me enquiries. I know it does. It also means that nearly every conversation I have starts with somebody who already knows the number and has decided it is worth discussing, which is a far better use of both our time than the alternative.

I spent years in my own trade business never publishing a rate, and I would do it the other way round now.

The decision, in one line

If your diary is empty, keep your options open and publish a minimum charge at least. If your diary is full of quotes that go nowhere, publish properly and watch the wrong enquiries stop.

Either way, publish something. A site that will not tell somebody what it costs is asking them to make a phone call on faith, and a surprising number of them will ring the next business on the list instead. That is one of the quieter reasons a website gets no calls.