A Price Range Instead of Silence

The objection, taken seriously

Every job genuinely is different, and a published figure that turns out to be wrong is worse than no figure.

Businesses that have been held to an old price, or accused of quoting higher than their website, have a real reason for caution.

The mistake is treating that as a choice between an exact price and nothing at all.

A range, anchored properly and caveated honestly, is neither, and it does the job the silence was preventing.

What silence actually costs

Not just lost enquiries, which is the obvious cost.

The people who do enquire arrive with no idea of the scale, so a proportion of every quoting conversation is discovering that the budget is a quarter of the figure.

Those conversations take time, produce nothing, and happen because the site withheld the one thing that would have prevented them.

Meanwhile the people who would have been comfortable with the price never made contact, because they assumed it was more.

Silence filters in exactly the wrong direction: it deters the qualified and admits the unqualified.

Anchor it to something recognisable

• A room of a stated size.
• A typical house in your area.
• A specific quantity: per metre, per unit, per hour.
• A named example job you actually did.
• A time period, for anything ongoing.

The fourth is the strongest. A worked example with the actual figure, the actual scope, and what was involved lets a reader place themselves against something real rather than against an abstraction.

Give the typical, not just the extremes

Since a range alone is frequently useless.

Between eight hundred and six thousand dollars tells a reader almost nothing, because their situation could be anywhere in it.

Most are between fifteen hundred and two thousand five hundred, with smaller jobs from about eight hundred and large ones reaching six thousand, tells them where they probably sit.

Naming the typical figure is what converts a range into information.

It also protects you, since somebody at the top of the range has been told that end exists and why.

Draw the typical from your own records rather than from memory, which takes ten minutes and is more accurate than anybody's impression.

Name what moves it

The part that makes the range credible and does the qualifying.

List the two or three factors that actually change the figure most: access, condition, size, whether something has to be removed first.

Explain roughly how much each moves it, even approximately, since that is what lets somebody estimate their own position.

A reader who can see why a job might be at the top of the range and recognises their own situation in that description has qualified themselves.

That is the mechanism by which a price page reduces wasted quotes rather than increasing them.

A worked example

A business published nothing about price and quoted everything on site.

Roughly half of their site visits produced no useful outcome, and a similar proportion of quotes came back with the customer surprised at the figure.

They added a page giving a typical range, the most common figure, three factors that moved it, and two real jobs with the actual prices and what each had involved.

Enquiries fell by about a fifth and site visits that produced work rose noticeably.

The enquiries that stopped were mostly people whose budget was a fraction of the figure, which they had been travelling to discover.

The owner's assessment was that he was doing less work for more money, which is the whole argument for the page.

Keep it defensible

Since the fear of being held to it is the real objection.

Say plainly that it is a guide and that a firm price follows an assessment, once, without repeating it in every paragraph.

Date the page and review it, since a range from three years ago is the version that causes arguments.

Use words that describe a distribution rather than a promise: typically, most, in the region of.

And where costs are genuinely volatile, say what they depend on and how recently the figures were checked.

Those precautions cost a sentence and remove almost all of the exposure.

Where you genuinely cannot

Because some work does not admit a range at all.

Where the variation is enormous and unpredictable, say that explicitly and say what determines it, which is still more useful than saying nothing.

Give a minimum instead, which is a defensible figure and does most of the qualifying: we do not take on work under a certain amount.

Or publish the price of the first step, such as an assessment or a survey, which is a real number and tells somebody what engaging with you costs.

Each of those is a partial answer, and partial answers outperform silence.

Tell staff the same figures

A consistency point that decides whether the page helps or causes arguments.

Anybody answering the phone should be giving the same range as the site, in the same terms, since a caller who was told one thing online and another by a person trusts neither.

Put the figures somewhere staff can see them, and update both together whenever prices change.

That also means the page becomes the reference rather than each person's own approximation, which is usually an improvement on what happens now.

Ask whoever takes calls what they currently quote, since the answer is frequently three different figures and that is the actual problem the page is solving.

The counter-case

Publishing has real costs.

Competitors read it, and in a market where you are the more expensive option a published range invites comparison on the one dimension you would rather not compete on.

Some sectors also have conventions against it, and being the only firm publishing can read as odd rather than as transparent.

And where the price genuinely depends on a survey, an invented range creates the expectation problem it was meant to solve.

Publish a typical figure with the factors that move it, date it, and where you cannot, publish a minimum instead.

Writing the page

1. Look at your last twenty jobs of that type.
2. Anchor to something a reader recognises.
3. Give the typical figure, not just the range.
4. Name the two or three things that move it.
5. Include two real examples with actual prices.
6. Say once that it is a guide.
7. Date it and review it annually.

Step three is what makes the range useful, since extremes alone leave a reader unable to place themselves and no better informed than before.

The full case against hiding prices is covered in a shop site that hides the price.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.