Why We Publish Our Prices

Scroll through the websites of most web development studios and you will notice a small pattern.

There are no prices.

There are service tiers with no numbers. There are “starting at” ranges that trail off into punctuation. There are contact forms that promise “a custom quote tailored to your needs,” which is a polite way of saying “we will decide what to charge you after we have looked at you for a while.”

We publish our prices on the services page. A lot of people in our industry think this is a mistake.

Here is why we do it anyway.

Hidden prices waste your time

If your budget is two thousand dollars and a studio’s starter project is twelve, a price tag saves both of you a week of back-and-forth and a very awkward Zoom call. You find a better fit. They keep their afternoon.

Hidden pricing is almost always a filter working against the client. The studio gets to evaluate you before they commit to a number. The number, when it arrives, is informed by what they think you will pay.

A published price is the opposite. It is a promise made in public before anyone has looked at your budget.

Hidden prices punish small businesses

Big companies have procurement departments that will grind a quote down for weeks. A small business has one owner, usually with a day job already, who just needs to know if a website is nine hundred dollars or nine thousand so they can figure out whether to have the conversation at all.

Most of our clients are in the second category. They do not have time to fish for a quote. They have a business to run. The fastest thing we can do for them is put the number on a page so they can make a decision in ninety seconds and get back to work.

Hidden prices encourage bad-faith pricing

When nobody can see the number, every number is a negotiation. The price goes up when the client sounds nervous. The price goes down when the client sounds like they are about to walk. Over the course of a year, the same project gets quoted at six different prices, and the client who pays the most is usually the one who trusted the studio the most. That is not a business model we are comfortable with.

A published price is the same for everyone. The client who is great at negotiating and the client who is bad at it pay the same for the same thing. That is closer to how we want to do business.

The honest objection

There is a real reason studios hide prices, and it is not just vibes.

Custom software is hard to quote without knowing the scope. The difference between a “medium” web app and a “complex” one is often not obvious until you are three conversations in. Pinning a single number to that can feel irresponsible.

We have a version of that concern. Our custom Web Apps service has tiers with starting prices, but also a clear “custom quote” tier for projects that are too big or too complex to price on a page. That is honest. What is not honest is applying the same logic to a five-page website and pretending it cannot be quoted without a discovery call.

Most small business websites can be quoted from a page. Pretending otherwise is marketing.

What published pricing forces us to do

Putting numbers on a page keeps us honest in a way that hidden pricing does not.

We have to actually understand our scope. If our starter tier is nineteen hundred dollars, we need to know exactly what that covers, because someone is going to hand us nineteen hundred dollars and expect it.

We have to be efficient. There is no room to pad the hours.

We have to say no sometimes. If a project is bigger than our tier, we have to say so up front, rather than quietly running over and billing more at the end.

All of those are good disciplines.

The short version

We publish our prices because it is easier for clients, it is fairer across clients, and it keeps us honest. If that reads as naive, we are comfortable with that.

The services page has the tiers. The contact form is the fastest way to start a conversation. You will know the number before you pick up the phone.