Should You Publish Prices on Your Website or Ask People to Get in Touch
The phone rings on Wednesday at 8:40. “Morning, how much do you charge to clean the windows on a detached house?” You explain that it depends on the number of windows and how many floors there are, offer to come and look, and hear “right, I’ll get back to you.” She never does. That afternoon you call back three people who used the contact form, and two of them drop out the moment you name a figure, because they were expecting half of it.
That scene plays out in half the small service businesses out there, and it always ends with the same question: put a price list on the site, or keep inviting people to call. “It depends” is a true answer here and a completely useless one, so let’s work out what it actually depends on, and how to show a price for a job that has no single rate.
Silence does not cut the number of conversations, it changes who is having them
Owners who keep prices off the site usually defend it the same way: “I want to talk first, so I can explain the value.” Reasonable in theory. In practice, enquiries with a price on the site look nothing like enquiries without one.
With no figure published you get more enquiries, but a good share of them come from people who cannot afford the work or are after something else entirely. Those conversations cost you real hours: the call, the site visit, the quote, the wait for an answer that never arrives. With a figure published there are fewer enquiries, and more of them turn into jobs, because the customer has already screened themselves, calmly, without a salesperson breathing down their neck.
There is one more group that is easy to forget: people who simply will not ring a business that hides its prices. Not because of budget, but because they refuse to enter a sales conversation to learn something a competitor wrote on their site in a single line. You will never see those customers in your statistics, because they left no trace.
Three formats before you publish a full price list
“Publishing prices” does not have to mean a table listing every service you offer. There are several levels of detail, and most businesses need the middle one.
| Format | When it fits | What it looks like |
|---|---|---|
| A “from” figure | the service has a clear basic version | “Boiler inspection from PLN 180” |
| A range | scope moves the price two or three times over | “Post-renovation cleaning: PLN 12-20 per m², depending on condition” |
| A worked example | every job is quoted individually | “3.5 m fitted kitchen, sprayed fronts: PLN 14,200, six weeks” |
| A full price list | repeatable services at a set rate | a treatment table in a clinic, a service list in a salon |
The “from” figure has one trap. When the real quote lands three times higher, the customer feels misled and says so in a review. Use it when “from” genuinely happens, not as bait.
The worked example is the most underrated of the four. Instead of an abstract rate you show one real job from last month: what was included, how long it took, what it cost. The reader holds it up against their own situation and knows straight away whether they are in that league. Three examples, small to large, do more work than a twenty-line price list.
Show what moves the number
Individually quoted services can be described. You just have to stop describing the price and start describing the drivers. The customer does not need an exact figure, they need to know which end of the range they will land on.
List three to five things that move the number: floor area, how many rooms, an upper floor with no lift, travel outside town, a rush deadline, materials supplied or your own. Next to each one, give the direction and rough size of the effect, even loosely: “travel over 25 km: plus PLN 2 per kilometre, both ways”. People run that arithmetic in ten seconds and call already briefed.
The same list is worth reusing in your enquiry form, because those are exactly the fields you want filled in before you pick up the phone. We covered how to build a form people actually finish in the piece on a contact form that gets enquiries.
Put a boundary next to the figure
A number on its own raises new questions, and every one of them is another phone call. Four sentences around the price head most of them off.
Say what is included and what comes on top, because that is where the misunderstandings live: materials, waste removal, travel, weekend work. State the basis of the charge, whether it is per hour, per square metre, per item or for the whole job. Add how long the quote holds, especially if you work with materials whose prices swing. Then payment terms: deposit, due date, invoicing, instalments if you offer them. A line as plain as “prices include VAT, nothing added at the end” saves more correspondence than you would think.
“Our competitors will see our prices”
They will. They already do, just the long way round: ringing as a customer, asking for a quote by email, asking the clients who moved from you to them. A rival who wants your rates has them inside a week, whatever your website says.
So the real cost of hiding prices is paid by the people who wanted to buy, not by the competition. It is also worth noticing that price wars do not start with a published price list, they start when nothing else is being argued. If choosing a contractor in your trade comes down purely to the figure, publishing it changes nothing; and if it comes down to quality, timing and confidence, then those are the things that belong next to the figure. We pulled together how to write sections like that in the article on what to write on a business website.
When leaving prices out is the right call
Some trades and situations really are hurt by a published price list, and it is worth saying so plainly.
First: project work, where the scope only takes shape during the conversation. A firm doing bespoke implementations, a law practice handling cases of wildly different complexity, a contractor bidding for tenders. A figure with no defined scope means nothing there, and both sides will read it differently.
Second: services where the price depends mostly on what you find on arrival, and nobody can judge that remotely. Maintenance on ageing installations, restoring old furniture, repairing something a previous owner already repaired their own way.
Third: a market where you deliberately sit well above or well below the going rate, and that is part of your strategy. Even then, instead of an empty “quoted individually”, write one sentence about who you work for: “projects from PLN 40,000, mostly houses still under construction”. That is still a filter, just an honest one.
A price list needs maintaining, not just publishing
An out-of-date price is worse than no price at all, because the customer arrives holding your own figure and feels cheated when they hear another. Put a price review in the calendar twice a year, plus one after any serious change in what your materials cost.
When you raise prices, do not quietly delete the old ones. Change the figure, add the date it takes effect and, if that suits your trade, leave a sentence of explanation. Customers take increases far more calmly than most owners expect, provided they read about them on the website rather than at the till.
It is also worth checking what happened to enquiries afterwards. Two numbers matter: how many people reached the pricing page, and how many of them sent the form or tapped the phone number. How to read that without drowning in dashboards is covered in the piece on how to know if your website brings customers. At Sitario both numbers are counted from day one in the Statistics tab, and once a week the system leaves a short summary in your panel of what came of it.
If you have nowhere to put those prices
All of this assumes you have a website where a figure can be changed quickly. When every edit means an email to whoever built the site and a two-day wait, your price list goes stale within six months.
At Sitario you describe your business in a form and roughly an hour later you are looking at a finished site, pricing section included, and you pay only once you accept it. The Start plan is a one-off PLN 249 with the first year of hosting, and renewal from year two costs PLN 149 a year. After that you change the figures yourself in the editor by clicking on the text, so Monday’s increase is live on Monday. We compared the full range of routes to a website in the article on how much a business website costs.
Half an hour of work
Take your last five jobs and write down the final figure and the scope for each. See whether they form a range or three separate worlds. If it is a range, you already have the pricing section for your site. If it is three worlds, write up three worked examples and note beside them what made the difference. That is enough for tomorrow’s callers to know the order of magnitude before they dial.