Ask a room of firm owners whether prices belong on a website and you get a fast, confident split. Half say it scares people off. Half say it saves everybody's time.
Almost nobody in that room has tested it.
The question of whether you should put your prices on your website is treated as a matter of taste, and it is really a question about which leads you want. So let's work through what silence costs you, the options between silence and a full rate card, and how to get your own answer inside a quarter.
Why do most firms leave prices off the website?
Because the reasons feel obvious and nobody checks them. Three arguments come up in every conversation we have about it.
- Fear of scaring people off: A number without context looks expensive, so the page loses the prospect before you can explain.
- Scope really does vary: Two clients ask for the same thing and need very different amounts of work.
- Competitors are watching: Publishing rates hands your pricing to the firm down the road.
All three are real. None of them is a reason to publish nothing at all, which is the leap most firms make.
There is a fourth reason nobody says out loud. A published price commits you, and a quote written after you have heard the budget does not. That flexibility is worth money, and it is worth being honest with yourself about it rather than filing it under "our work is all custom".
Buyers behave as though the number matters. HubSpot's research on B2B buying found 75% of buyers prefer to gather information on products on their own, and 57% bought a tool in a year without meeting the vendor's sales team. Those figures come from software, where a purchase can complete with no conversation at all. Professional services almost never work that way. The research habit still transfers.
What does hiding your price actually cost you?
Volume goes up and quality goes down. That is the trade, and it is the whole decision.
A page with no price invites everybody to enquire, including people whose budget is a fraction of your fee. They fill the form, you spend forty minutes on a call, and the conversation ends where a published number would have ended it in four seconds.
Three costs come out of that, and only the first one is visible.
- Partner hours: Every unqualified call is time nobody spent on a client, and nothing logs it.
- Slower replies to good leads: A queue full of browsers pushes the real prospect down it.
- The buyer who never wrote to you: Somebody screening on budget left in silence, and you hold no record of them.
That third cost is the one worth sitting with. It is invisible by definition.
Our own pattern across client work is consistent enough to name.
Pages without a price produce more form fills, and a smaller share of them turn into real conversations.
A three-partner advisory firm we work with put one line on a single service page, saying planning engagements start at $6,000 a year. Over the following quarter their form fills dropped from 31 to 19. Booked calls went from 7 to 9.
Fewer enquiries brought more business.
That is the shape the trade usually takes, though your own numbers will differ. Part of the leak sits after the form as well, which is the wider problem behind website lead leaks.
Is your fee schedule already public?
For a registered investment adviser, it already is. Plenty of advisory firms guard their fees on the website while the same fee schedule sits on a government site anyone can search.
The rule is plain. An investment adviser must describe in its brochure how it is compensated for its advisory services, provide a fee schedule, and disclose whether fees are negotiable.
That brochure does not stay between you and your clients.
"Investment advisers are required to deliver to advisory clients their brochures, which will be made available to the public on the IAPD website."
So a prospect who wants your fees can find them. The only question is whether they read them on your page or on a regulator's. The underlying requirement sits in Item 5 of Form ADV Part 2, which also governs how you describe negotiability.
Who this argument does not cover
Worth being precise, because the point only holds for one part of the professional-services world.
- Registered investment advisers: The fee schedule is published. Website silence hides nothing.
- Accountants and attorneys: No equivalent public filing, so silence really does keep rates private.
- Insurance and brokerage: Commission disclosure rules differ, so check what your own filings already say.
Advisers get a free decision here that other firms do not. If the number is public anyway, publishing it on your own page costs you nothing and buys you the qualified-lead benefit. Advisers weighing what else the rules permit will find the same pattern in local SEO for financial advisors, where compliance turns out to allow far more than most firms assume.
What sits between silence and a full price list?
Four levels, and most firms only ever consider the two at the ends. The middle two do most of the work.
| Level | What you publish | Suits | What it costs you |
|---|---|---|---|
| Silence | Nothing at all | Work truly priced per client | Every buyer who screens on budget |
| A floor | Engagements start at $X | Most professional services | Little, beyond the anchor it sets |
| A band | Most projects run $X to $Y | Work where scope really varies | A conversation about why a job sits high |
| A full schedule | Fixed packages or an hourly rate | Standardised, repeatable services | Room to price by value |
A floor is the cheapest experiment on that list. One sentence, no commitment to a ceiling, and it filters the bottom of your enquiry list immediately.
Start at the floor unless you have a reason to go further. You can always widen later, and moving from a published band back to silence looks worse than never having published.
We publish our own numbers, which is where what a business website costs came from. It is a fair test to run on any agency you are considering.
How do you test this on your own site?
On one page, for one quarter, with the numbers written down before you start. The reason this question stays unsettled in most firms is that nobody sets it up as a test.
Five steps cover the whole test.
- Pick one service page: Your highest-intent page rather than the homepage, so the result stays readable.
- Write down today's numbers first: Form fills, booked calls and qualified enquiries for the last 90 days.
- Add one line at the floor level: A single sentence naming a starting figure, placed near the call to action rather than buried.
- Change nothing else for a quarter: No new headline, no new form, no redesign, or you will not know what moved the result.
- Compare qualified enquiries, then decide: Widen to a band, hold at the floor, or revert.
Ninety days is the minimum on a professional-services site, since enquiry volumes are low and a fortnight of data tells you nothing. Firms with real seasonality need a full year-on-year comparison instead, which accountants especially should plan around.
One caution before you trust any jump in form fills. Check the new submissions are people, because a rise in form volume can be automated traffic rather than buyers, which is the problem behind how much traffic is bots.
Which numbers tell you it worked?
Booked calls, and almost nothing else. Form count is the number everybody watches and the one most likely to mislead you here, because a good result usually makes it fall.
| What to watch | Where it lives | What a real change looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Form fills | Analytics | Expect a drop, and do not panic about it |
| Qualified enquiries | Your notes or CRM | The number that has to hold or rise |
| Booked calls | Your calendar or booking tool | The closest weekly proxy for revenue |
| Proposal-to-close rate | CRM | The slow one, so give it two quarters |
Decide what "qualified" means before the test starts, in writing. A definition invented afterwards will quietly bend toward whatever result you were hoping for.
Two of those rows depend on knowing where an enquiry came from, which analytics does not solve alone. Lead source tracking is its own job. The thresholds for reading any conversion number sit in website performance benchmarks.
We will not tell you what to charge. That depends on your costs, your market and your capacity, none of which a web team can see from the outside.
When should prices stay off the page?
In three situations, and they are narrower than the people arguing for silence tend to claim.
- Every engagement is different every time: Litigation and complex restructuring work resist a floor because the range is enormous.
- You are mid-repositioning: Publishing today's rate anchors you to it while you are trying to move upmarket.
- The number is your weakest point: If you are the most expensive option and cannot yet show why, the page needs the proof before it needs the price.
That third one is the honest reason behind a lot of silence, and it points at a content problem rather than a pricing one. Case studies, named results and credentials do that work, and they belong on the page anyway for a website that converts at all.
Notice that none of these three is "our competitors might see it". They will see it. They already know roughly what you charge, because your former prospects told them.
Where to start this quarter
Pick your best service page and add one sentence with a starting figure. Write down this quarter's form fills and booked calls before you publish it, then leave the page alone for 90 days.
Most firms we speak to have carried an untested assumption about this for years, in whichever direction they landed. The assumption costs them either good leads or partner hours, and neither shows up on a report.
The wider question of what your site should be producing is worth asking at the same time, and SEO return on investment covers how to hold any provider to a number, ours included.
What would change for your firm if the next ten enquiries all knew your starting price before they wrote to you? If you want a second pair of eyes on which page to test first, you can start a conversation rather than sit through a pitch.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do competitors actually watch your published rates?
They do, and it changes less than owners expect. Rivals already estimate your rates from prospects who shopped both of you. A published figure mostly removes their guesswork about the low end.
How often should a published rate get updated?
Once a year is enough for a floor, timed with whenever you review fees anyway. A figure that drifts two years out of date does more damage than no figure, because the first conversation then starts with a correction.
What do you tell someone who asks for a quote by email?
Give the range and the two things that move it. A reply that asks for a call before naming any number reads as evasive to a buyer who has already seen a starting figure on your page.
Does discounting undermine a rate you have published?
Discounting from a published floor is normal, and doing it often is the problem. If most clients pay less than the stated start, the stated start is wrong and the page needs correcting.
Can you publish rates for one service while leaving others open?
Mixing levels across services works well. A standardised service supports a fixed figure, while advisory work may only carry a floor. Keep the logic consistent across the site so the pattern reads as deliberate rather than arbitrary to anyone comparing two of your pages.