A Santa Fe contractor called me last month because his phone had gone quiet. He had traffic — Google Analytics said so — but almost no calls. When we walked through his site, the pattern was obvious. He had a services page, a gallery, testimonials, an about page, and a contact form. What he did not have anywhere was a number. Not a starting price, not a ballpark, not even a “typical project range.” A visitor could scroll for ten minutes and never learn whether he was a $200 handyman or a $200,000 general contractor. Most of them, quite reasonably, left to look at someone who told them.
Whether to publish prices is one of the questions I hear most often from small-business owners planning a new website. It sounds like a marketing question. It is really a question about who you want to attract and how much of their time — and yours — you want to save.
Should you show prices on your website?
For most small businesses, yes — some form of pricing belongs on the site. The evidence is consistent: in one widely cited survey, 72% of buyers named “no pricing on the website” as their single greatest frustration when researching companies online. A separate B2B study found that hiding prices behind a “Contact Sales” gate loses roughly 61% of buyers who would rather serve themselves than schedule a call. Nielsen Norman Group has documented the same behavior for two decades in usability testing: participants get frustrated, close the tab, and go to a competitor whose numbers are visible.
The reason is not that people are cheap. It is that a number, any number, is a filter. It tells a stranger in five seconds whether the conversation you would have is worth either of your time. Without it, everyone has to squeeze into the same “get in touch” funnel — the tire-kicker, the perfect-fit client, and the person who thought you sold something entirely different.
Three ways to publish a price
“Show prices” is not one thing. It is a spectrum. Pick the point on it that matches how your work actually scopes.
1. A firm price
Retail, food, wellness, and a lot of productized services can name an exact number. A 60-minute massage is $120. A brake job is $340. A logo design package is $3,500. If you can quote it without a conversation, put it on the page. This is the easiest version and, when it fits, the most powerful.
2. A range or a starting-at
Custom work rarely fits a firm price, but almost every custom business has a floor and a ceiling. A brand identity project typically runs $8,000 to $25,000 for a small business. A custom WordPress build starts around $12,000 and can climb well past $60,000 depending on integrations. A kitchen remodel in Santa Fe rarely starts under $40,000. Publishing a range does not lock you in. It filters. The person whose budget is $2,000 does not waste a call, and the person whose budget is $30,000 arrives already comfortable with the ballpark.
3. A methodology and a set of examples
When even a range would mislead — the project depends heavily on discovery, or the same deliverable can vary tenfold based on scope — publish how you price and what a few real projects have cost. “A single-page landing site typically lands between $3,000 and $6,000. A 12-page marketing site with a blog and custom templates lands between $15,000 and $30,000. An e-commerce build with catalog and POS integration usually starts around $25,000 and can exceed $75,000.” That is a page a buyer can read and self-qualify against without a call. It also signals that you have priced enough projects to know your own numbers, which is quietly reassuring.
When holding pricing back is defensible
There are two situations where staying quiet on numbers can be the right call.
Legal, medical, and high-stakes professional services. When the price genuinely depends on facts the client will only reveal in a confidential intake — a criminal charge, a personal-injury claim, a divorce with property, a complex tax matter — publishing a rate can mislead more than it helps. A Santa Fe attorney who takes personal injury and business litigation cases cannot post a menu. The scope is discovered, not selected. In cases like these, publishing a clear intake process (“Free 30-minute consultation. Most matters are handled on contingency; hourly matters bill at $350–$450 per hour depending on complexity”) does the same job a price would: it filters out the people you are not for.
Bespoke high-end work where numbers do the wrong signaling. A luxury wedding florist rarely posts full pricing because a couple’s arrangement can range from $6,000 to $60,000 and the number alone does not communicate what is included. Even here, though, most successful bespoke businesses now publish a starting investment (“Most weddings start at $8,000”) because the alternative is an inbox full of $2,000 inquiries.
Notice what both exceptions share. They replace the price with something equally filter-like — a starting investment, an intake description, a scope-of-work explanation. Silence is not the strategy. Substitution is.
What a good pricing page actually contains
If you decide to publish, the page itself matters. A number in isolation reads as a threat. A number in context reads as an invitation. The pages that work tend to include five things:
- The number, range, or starting-at, stated plainly and near the top.
- What the number includes, listed in bullets a non-expert can understand.
- What could push it up or down (add-ons, complexity, timeline).
- How you bill (deposit, milestones, net terms) so the total commitment is legible.
- A next step that is not “book a call,” but also not just a form — something like “Send me a paragraph about your project and I will reply within one business day with whether it is a fit.”
What does not belong on a pricing page: fake urgency, artificial scarcity, ten tiers, or a comparison to competitors you have not actually studied. Buyers who reach a pricing page are already interested. Do not use the page to sell them harder. Use it to help them decide.
The internal-referral test
Here is a simple test I use with clients who are on the fence. Imagine a well-meaning friend refers a stranger to you. The stranger opens your website. They have thirty seconds. Can they figure out whether you are within their budget?
If the answer is no, that friend just spent social capital sending you a lead who will bounce, and you are about to spend an hour on a discovery call that ends with “I did not realize it would be that much.” A number, even an approximate one, prevents all of that. It is the smallest change you can make to your website that has the biggest effect on the quality of the conversations you have next.
A note on Santa Fe and the small-market discount
Small-market owners in New Mexico sometimes worry that publishing a national-grade price will scare off locals who expect a hometown discount. In my experience it does the opposite. It filters out the people who wanted to negotiate you down to a favor, and it builds trust with the ones bracing for the “we will send you a quote” runaround. Local buyers are not fragile. They are busy.
Closing
Not every business should publish a firm number, but nearly every business should publish something a stranger can use to qualify themselves. A range, a starting investment, a scope-of-work example, a clear intake process — any of them beats silence. The professional-services exception is real but narrow, and even Santa Fe attorney Slate Stern, whose personal injury and business litigation work cannot be menu-priced, uses a clear intake step to do the same qualifying work a price would. The point is to help the right people say yes and give the wrong people permission to leave without either of you spending an afternoon finding out.
Patrick Iverson has been designing and building custom WordPress websites for small and mid-sized businesses across New Mexico since 2003 — from Santa Fe and Albuquerque to Las Cruces and remote clients nationwide. If a pricing page (or the decision about whether to have one) is on your list for a website you are planning, send a paragraph about your business and I will reply with a straight answer.