Should I put my pricing on my website?

Business and TechnologyThere are certain questions I get from clients all the time. One of those questions that recurs often (and has come up twice this week) is whether or not to post prices on a website.

Many clients I speak to genuinely fear posting prices. I often hear “what if I scare people away?” “I sell myself well, but what if the customer sees my prices and doesn’t give me a chance?” It is a fair question, pricing on a web page can indeed lead customers to go elsewhere.

For Spring Insight, I have chosen a side on this debate. If you go to my services page, you will see that I do indeed list price guidance. Before I made the decision to do so, I had the same concerns and went through the same mental calculations. The reason I decided to go for it though was that I came to the conclusion that the people that left the site without contacting me after seeing my pricing weren’t actually being scared off. Instead, they were self selecting themselves out of my target audience.

I know that my pricing is on the high end for some people. The intensive iterative approach we have to strategy and the custom coding we do make that a necessity. A visitor to my site who has a budget of $2,500 for a website isn’t the right client for my service. If she sees my pricing and goes off without contacting me, she has saved me the time it takes to talk to her, suss out her needs, and pitch her on my services. We are both better off. I haven’t wasted my time on trying to sell her when she is clearly not the right customer, she hasn’t had her time wasted by someone she can’t (or doesn’t want to) afford. We are all happy.

An unexpected result for me since putting my pricing on the site is that I find that I am more confident when I speak to potential customers. If I know they have reviewed my website, I know that they have a baseline expectation of my pricing. They won’t be surprised when the topic shifts to pricing so I don’t have to fear talking about it. That freedom is weirdly exhilarating.

So, my answer… yes, put pricing on your website. Be loud and proud.