It is nine at night and you have three tabs open. You need a new sign for the front of the shop. Or a website. Or somebody to take the bookkeeping off your Sundays. Two of the three companies have a page that says Request a Quote. The third has a number on it.
You are not going to phone anyone tonight. So you close the first two and read the third properly. Not because it is the best. Because it is the only one that told you anything.
That is most of what a hidden price does. It rarely delays the decision. It hands the decision to whoever did not hide one.
There is an honest version of “it depends”, and some work genuinely cannot be priced from a web page. Both are worth knowing. You will buy plenty of things from people who are not us.
What it costs you to find out the price
Getting a number out of a quote form is not free. It is paid in your time instead of theirs.
You fill in the form. Somebody replies to book a call. The call happens at a time that suits them. They do this all day. You do it once every few years. It runs half an hour, and most of it is them asking about your business. Then the number arrives two days later in a document.
To compare three suppliers properly, you spend most of a week in small pieces. Then you are holding three numbers that do not line up, because each one priced a slightly different job. Lining them up is a fourth job nobody warned you about.
There is a quieter cost too. Once you have sat on a call with somebody, saying no has a weight it did not have before. You have met them. They were nice about your shop. Some sellers understand that perfectly well. It is why the call comes before the number, and not after it.
When the number is made after they meet you
This is the uncomfortable part, so here it is plainly.
If a price is not printed, it does not exist yet. It gets made after the call, by a person who now knows things about you. How big your operation is. Whether you have bought this kind of thing before. Whether you sounded worried about money. Whether you mentioned another quote was coming. All of that can go into the number. Sometimes it does.
That is not always dishonest. A plumber cannot price your bathroom from the street. A fence depends on the ground. Real work varies, and a good tradesperson pricing job by job is doing exactly what she should.
The trouble is that “we price each job individually” and “we price each buyer individually” look identical from where you are sitting. You cannot tell them apart from the outside. You can ask questions that make the difference visible. Those are further down this page.
The honest version of “it depends”
Here is what it looks like when somebody truly cannot print one number and is being straight with you about it.
They give you a range, and the range has a real bottom. Somebody actually paid the low number for a real job, and they will tell you what that job was.
They name the things that move the price. Not “every project is unique”, which tells you nothing. The two or three specific things that take you from the bottom of the range to the top. How many rooms. Whether the old one comes out first. Whether you write the words or they do.
And those things are ones you can check yourself, before you speak to anybody. If you can work out roughly where you land while sitting on your own couch, that is an honest range. If working it out needs their judgment about you, the range is decoration.
“Starting from” often fails that test. It is a lowest number with no highest number, and the lowest one is usually the stripped version almost nobody buys. When you see it, the useful question is not “what does it start from”. It is “what did the last three jobs like mine come to, and what do I owe you every month after that”.
We use a “from” price ourselves, so hold us to the same question. What our lowest price includes is printed beside it, item by item. So is the bigger build. So is the monthly, and the tax is worked out for you rather than left as “plus applicable taxes”. If the one you want is the bigger one, you see the whole number before you speak to anybody.
How to read a fixed price
When somebody does print a number, the number is the easy part. What matters is the list around it. Before you pay anything, you want five things in writing, in words you would use yourself.
What is being made, listed as items rather than adjectives. “A five page website with a booking page” is an item. “A modern web presence” is an adjective.
What happens when the job changes, and who decides it changed. Things always change. The question is whether that conversation has rules or arrives as a surprise on the invoice.
What is not included. This is the one people skip and the one that hurts. Ask directly, then ask again in a different way.
What you owe every month afterwards, and for how long. A fixed build price with an open-ended monthly attached to it is not a fixed price. It is a deposit.
What you keep if you stop paying. If the answer is complicated, that is the answer.
What to ask when nobody will print a number
Send these by email, to all three, on the same evening, before any call.
- What did the last three jobs like mine come to?
- What would push it above that?
- What is the cheapest version of this you would still put your name on?
- What do I owe you every month once it is finished?
- If I stop paying you, what do I keep?
Every one of those can be answered in a short email by somebody who knows their own business. If all five require a meeting, the meeting is the product.
Read the replies for how they answer, not just for the numbers. One person answers four of them and says “the fifth depends, and here is exactly why”. Another answers all five in a paragraph that never commits to anything. The first one is being straighter with you.
Why ours are printed
Because a printed price is something you can hold us to. It sits on the page and it does not move based on what we learn about you on a call.
It is worth saying what printing a price does not do. It does not make it the right price for you, and it does not make it the lowest. Somebody will always be cheaper. What it does is let you decide whether to keep reading. You do not have to spend an afternoon of your life to find out.
We also cannot promise what any of it will do for your bookings, your search results or your revenue. Neither can anybody else. Anybody who says otherwise is selling the one thing they cannot deliver.
What to actually do
If you are partway through with somebody, and the work is good and the price feels fair, do nothing. This is not an argument for switching. Plenty of people who hide their prices are decent. They inherited the habit from the industry around them.
If you are about to buy something, do two things before any call. Write down two numbers, for yourself only. The highest you would say yes to, and the one where you walk away. Then send the five questions by email. Who replies, how fast and how plainly will tell you more than the quotes do.
You do not need us for any of that. It works on the sign company, the bookkeeper and the linen service exactly as well as it works on anyone building websites.
If you would rather somebody looked at your setup before you spend a dollar anywhere, that is what the free website sample is. You send your business name. We build two sections of your real website, using your own words and pictures, and send you the link. It is yours to look at whether or not you ever hire us.