Why We Publish Our Prices

Search for what any marketing service costs and you will mostly find pages that spend eight hundred words explaining that every business is unique before inviting you to book a call.

That is a sales technique, not a limitation. Pricing is genuinely variable. It is not unknowable. Anyone who has done a piece of work more than twice can give you a range in the first conversation, and one who will not is usually either pricing off your perceived budget or does not know what the work involves.

So our numbers are on the pricing page. A diagnostic starts at $950. Implementation starts at $1,500 if your team does the work and $3,500 if we do. A build starts at $4,500, a store build at $7,000, ongoing work at $1,500 a month. Every figure is a floor, and the six things that move it above the floor are listed underneath.

Here is the honest case for and against doing that, because there is a real case against.

What it costs us

It loses deals we would have won. Somebody with a $2,000 budget sees $4,500 and leaves without asking. In a conversation we might have found the version of the work that fits. That conversation now never happens, and there is no way to know how often.

It gives competitors a number to undercut. Anyone pricing against us starts from a published figure, which is a real disadvantage.

A floor gets read as a price. "From $950" and "$950" are not the same claim, but people remember the number, not the preposition. That has to be managed carefully and honestly at the point of quoting.

None of those are imaginary. The agencies hiding their pricing are not all being cynical; some of them have thought about this and landed somewhere else.

Why we do it anyway

It respects the reader's time, including our own. Someone whose budget is nowhere near ours finds that out in four seconds instead of after two calls and a proposal. That is better for them and better for us.

It makes the quote defensible. When the number in the agreement is the number on the page, there is nothing to negotiate about the principle of the price — only about scope. Scope is a productive conversation. Price-as-mystery is not.

It is the same argument we make to clients. We tell businesses that a page which asserts nothing specific does not get cited, and that an engine cannot recommend what it cannot confirm. A services page that answers "what does this cost" with "it depends" is exactly that page. It would be strange to sell that advice and not take it.

It filters for the client we want. People who arrive having read the pricing page arrive knowing what they are buying. That is a different conversation from one that starts with a number landing as a surprise.

The part that surprised us

Publishing the prices forced us to have them.

"It depends" is comfortable partly because it is vague. Writing a floor for each thing we sell meant deciding what was actually included at that floor, what pushed it up, and which work we could not honestly put a starting number on at all.

One of our services still says "Custom, scoped individually" for exactly that reason — the variance between a two-location practice and a twenty-location one is too wide for a floor to mean anything. That is a more honest answer than inventing a number, and we could only arrive at it by trying to write one down.

What we would tell you to do

If you sell something with genuine variance, publish the floor and publish what moves it. Two columns: here is where this starts, and here are the specific things that push it up. Nobody feels misled by a range that explains itself.

If you sell something fixed, publish the price. There is no argument for hiding a number that does not change.

And if you genuinely cannot price something without scoping it, say that plainly and say why. "These vary too much to carry a starting price honestly" is a sentence a reader will accept. Eight hundred words of throat-clearing before a contact form is not.