Almost every owner we talk to has the same instinct about prices: keep them off the site. The reasons are always sensible. Competitors will undercut me. Every job is different. If they see the number before they understand the value, I lose them.
So the page says “contact us for a quote”, and the owner feels protected. What actually happens is that a stranger who was ready to buy closes the tab and opens the next one, where somebody was willing to tell them something.
What a missing price actually does
Put yourself on the other side of the screen. Someone needs a deep clean, a new site, a monthly bookkeeping arrangement. They have three tabs open and about four minutes of patience. Two of the three give them something to work with. Yours asks them to fill in a form and wait.
They are not offended. They just have no way to place you. And a person who cannot place you does one of two things: assumes you are the expensive one and leaves, or sends the enquiry and keeps shopping while they wait. Either way you have handed the decision to whoever answers next.
There is a second cost that owners feel but rarely name. When nobody knows your price, everybody asks. Your inbox fills with people who were never going to book, and you spend real hours quoting jobs that were dead before you opened the message. Hiding the number did not filter anyone. It moved the filtering from your website to your evenings.
The three fears, answered
“Competitors will undercut me.” They already know what you charge. They have quoted against you, they have heard it from customers, and in most trades the going rate is not a secret. The only person your silence keeps in the dark is the buyer.
“Every job is different.” True, and irrelevant to the question being asked. Nobody reading your site expects a binding quote. They want to know whether you are a ₦40,000 business or a ₦400,000 business, because that tells them whether to keep reading.
“They will judge the price before they understand the value.” They will do that anyway, with a number they invented. You can either put a real one in front of them next to your best explanation of what it buys, or let them guess in a vacuum. Guessing rarely goes your way.
Four ways to publish a price without pinning yourself
A starting price. The simplest move, and enough for most service businesses. “Deep cleans from ₦25,000.” “Websites from ₦450,000.” One line, one number, and everyone who reads it now knows whether to carry on.
Packages. Three named options with what each includes. This works when your work genuinely comes in shapes, and it does something a single number cannot: it moves the customer’s question from “should I buy?” to “which one?” Most people take the middle one, which is usually the one you wanted to sell.
A worked example. Instead of a price list, show a real job. “A three bedroom flat, two coats, furniture moved and replaced: ₦180,000, four days.” Nobody mistakes it for their quote, and yet it answers the question completely. This is the one to use when your work is too varied for a list.
A range with the levers. Publish the span and explain what moves a job up or down it: size, access, urgency, condition, how much of the old thing has to be undone first. A buyer who can see the levers can place themselves on the scale, and they arrive at the call already speaking your language.
Put it in plain text, not in a picture
Whatever you publish, write it as text on the page. Not baked into a hero graphic, not in a downloadable PDF, not in a screenshot of a price list.
Two audiences depend on this. Someone on a phone with a bad connection, and the assistant your next customer asks about you first. A machine summarising local options can quote a starting price it can read, and cannot quote one that only exists inside an image.
When keeping it off the page is defensible
Sometimes it genuinely is. If your engagements are scoped from scratch every time and the spread between the smallest and the largest is tenfold, a headline number misleads more than it helps.
Even then, publish something. A minimum engagement (“we work with businesses from ₦300,000 a project”), a typical range for the work you do most, or the shape of your pricing: fixed fee, retainer, day rate. The goal is not a quote. It is to stop being unplaceable.
The quiet benefit
There is a version of this that has nothing to do with conversion. An owner who publishes a price has decided what they are worth, in public, where customers and competitors can see it. That decision leaks into everything else: how you talk on the call, how quickly you send the quote, how you respond when someone asks for a discount.
Vague pricing and vague confidence tend to travel together. Writing the number down is often the thing that fixes both.
Where this leaves you
Open your own site and try to answer, as a stranger, what this costs. If you cannot, you have found the leak, and it is a smaller fix than it feels: one line, one range, or one worked example, written next to a clear description of what the customer actually gets.
Building the page that carries it is the part we do. Clear offers, prices a stranger can read, and an enquiry route that gets answered fast enough to matter. Send us a message and tell us what you charge and who you are trying to reach; we will show you how we would put it on the page.
