Why we took the prices off our own website

We used to show prices. A quiz on our site would ask four questions and then quote somebody several thousand dollars before anybody had spoken to them.

We took all of it down. This is the argument, including the side we lost.

The case for showing prices

It is strong, and we want to be fair to it.

Nothing annoys a small business owner more than a website that will not say what something costs. Hiding the number wastes everybody's time, filters nobody, and makes people assume the answer is "more than you can afford". A competitor near us publishes a weekly price on their homepage and it is genuinely their best move — it removes the hesitation entirely.

Why we removed ours anyway

Because a price without proof beside it becomes the only thing anybody can judge you on.

We had no case studies on the site, no reviews, and no named client. In that situation a number is not information, it is the whole comparison — and against a cheaper competitor with a slicker page, we lose that comparison every time regardless of who does better work.

The quiz was the clearest example. Four questions, no conversation, and a stranger is looking at a number in the thousands with nothing on the page to explain why it would be worth it.

What we found while removing them

Three separate places where prices were leaking that nobody had rendered on screen.

The estimator put every real price into the page's HTML as an attribute so the browser could add them up — invisible on screen, one view-source away from being a price list. The search-engine markup published the full price list on every page, including the 404. And our first check for leaks missed both, because it searched for the formatted version — dollar sign, comma and all — while the code was quietly writing a bare number.

If you have ever hidden something on a web page rather than removing it from the page, it is worth checking which of those you actually did.

What we did instead

The prices still exist and drive everything internally. One setting controls whether a visitor sees them, and there is a test that fails the build if a price appears anywhere while that setting is off — so it cannot creep back one page at a time.

The site still says plainly that the exact number gets confirmed before anything is booked, and the free Growth Check is where that happens.

What would make us put them back

Three paying clients and a review to sit beside the number.

That is the whole condition, and it is written in the code next to the setting so that whoever reads it next knows this was a decision about sequencing rather than a principle. Hidden pricing is not more honest than published pricing. It is a worse experience that happens to be the right trade for about the next quarter.

If you are early and unproven, the same logic probably applies to you. If you have proof, publish the price — you will save everybody a phone call.