Pricing Transparency: Pros, Cons, and the Case for Yes

This week I had two conversations that made me think harder about pricing transparency than I have in years.

Both were with clients I respect. These clients are both smart, principled business owners who told me, in different ways, that they were not going to show pricing on their websites. And both had reasons that deserve to be taken seriously.

I want to write this piece as a real debate rather than a lecture: I’ll lay out what they said, steelman their concerns before I disagree with any of them, walk through the arguments and the data on the other side, and tell you where I ended up and why. But I want you to be able to think about this alongside me.

This piece is longer than most of what I write. That’s on purpose. This question deserves more than a hot take.

The Two Objections

The Senior-Care Founder

The first conversation was with a client who owns an in-home senior-care agency. His caregivers work with families on some of the most personal, complicated decisions a family ever makes. He charges around $36 an hour for a typical shift and about $46 an hour for shorter two-hour visits. His main competitor, from the family’s perspective, is often an assisted-living facility running about $5,000 a month.

We were reviewing his new homepage together, and I suggested adding a “our in-home care starts at $X per day” line. He entertained it briefly. Then he said this, almost word for word:

“I don’t want people seeing that, oh, well, their rate is $46 an hour, calling the next home care company and saying, hey, I looked at your website. They charge $46 an hour per hour for a two-hour service. What’s your rate? Oh, we charge $44. Great, I’ll go with you because home care is home care is home care. I just need some people to come take care of mom. That’s what I want to avoid.”

He kept going and gave me a scenario. A family scared and stressed about their aging parent. Someone from his team meeting them. The trust building through a conversation. And then, when the trust is there, the price making sense.

“I personally feel like once you’ve met somebody and they really like her and she’s doing a great job and she’s giving them peace of mind and assurance, and then she tells them, well, this is the rate for care… she can say in the moment, well, it certainly isn’t cheap, but this is kind of the going rate. You might be able to find somebody that’s a little cheaper, but they probably don’t do as good a job of vetting their caregivers as we do.”

His argument was that price without relationship is a commodity comparison, and that home care is not a commodity. He was worried the number, out of context, would flatten a nuanced, life-changing service into a decision made on hourly rates.

The client also cited a conversation with a nearby assisted-living director who had told him families “have a heart attack” the first time they hear a $5,000-a-month number. Then they shop three or four competitors and come back and say, “wow, you’re a really good deal.” The initial sticker shock, the director argued, is fine. Because relationship recovers the sale.

I took his objection seriously. I still do.

The Media Client

The second conversation came the next day, through email. A client in the broadcasting industry, one who sells ad inventory to businesses across our region, wrote to tell me they were passing on a proposal-generation mini-app we had pitched. Her exact words:

“I talked to our sales director briefly about the AI App that generates proposals. He is not interested currently; he has concerns about losing the human touchpoint and the numbers scaring people off before our team has a chance to communicate the value. I can definitely see us revisiting it down the road though.”

The specifics of the app aside, the objection is the same objection. And it is a widespread one. It has two parts.

One. The Human Touchpoint

If a number lands in front of a prospect before a person can have a conversation with them, the relationship is diminished. Selling becomes transactional. You lose whatever quality the human interaction was going to add.

Two. The Value Communication Problem

Numbers in isolation do not come with context. If someone sees a price without hearing the story of why the price is what it is, they will make a judgment based only on the number. If that number feels high, they walk away before you had a chance to help them see why it is worth it.

Both objections are principled, and both are widely held. I want to steelman them before I disagree with either.

Why These Fears Are Reasonable

Before I make the argument on the other side, I want to name the underlying fears honestly. These are the assumptions inside the two objections above, and they deserve to be examined instead of dismissed.

Fear One: Sticker Shock Closes the Door Before the Story Can Open It

This is real. A prospect who sees a $5,000 monthly number without context can genuinely bounce. So can a family looking at a $46 hourly caregiver rate when they thought $20 was the market. The concern is not imaginary. It is a real cognitive pattern.

Fear Two: Pricing Turns a Relationship Into a Commodity Comparison

This is also real. When two competitors publish similar prices and the buyer cannot easily tell them apart on any other dimension, the buyer defaults to price. If your service is genuinely differentiated, you do not want to be evaluated on the one dimension where nobody can see the difference.

Fear Three: Publishing a Price Locks You Into It

Once it’s on the site, walking it back feels like a downgrade. Raising it feels like a bait-and-switch. Some businesses hide prices simply because they do not want the operational cost of managing them publicly.

Fear Four: Competitors Will Use Your Published Price Against You

If your prices are visible, competitors can undercut you by a dollar, or a percentage, or a promotional offer. The visibility becomes a target.

Fear Five: Negotiation Leverage Vanishes

Some sales are negotiated. Some buyers need to feel they got a deal. If the price is publicly stated as a fixed number, the room for that dance disappears.

Each of these fears has some truth to it in some contexts. I want to acknowledge that clearly, because it matters that we’re not dismissing what smart business owners are actually worried about.

But Then There Is the Opposite Question

Here’s the question I keep coming back to.

What if the customer doesn’t call? What if the customer never reaches out and just silently leaves your site…

Every one of the fears above assumes the buyer engages with your business. They see the price, feel the sticker shock, compare to a competitor, bounce, and walk away.

But what if they never got that far? If they never picked up the phone, or never filled out the contact form? What if the customer who would have loved your service, who would have become a great client for years, went to your website and left because there was no way to figure out whether you were even in their range?

You will never see that loss. It leaves no trace in your CRM, and it doesn’t show up as a bad-fit inquiry you filtered out. It shows up as nothing.

The best question I can ask a business owner who is unsure about publishing pricing is not, “what could go wrong if you do?” It is, “what is already going wrong that you can’t see because you don’t?”

Let me try a few different framings of the same question.

What if Apple didn’t put prices on their products? Apple sells premium products at premium prices. Nobody would argue Apple is undermining its brand by publishing prices. The prices themselves are part of the brand. The transparency, in that context, is part of the trust.

What if an emergency plumber didn’t list a service-call price on their website? Some don’t. Some hide behind “call for quote.” The ones that publish, though, the ones that say “our emergency service call is $175 with the first hour included,” win the call. In a market where a homeowner is standing in three inches of water, transparency is not just marketing. It is trust.

What if a service business runs ads and its website says only “call for a quote”? The prospect Googles the question. They don’t find your answer. They find a competitor’s answer, and they call the competitor.

Marcus Sheridan built his River Pools case study around this exact phenomenon. One article about how much a fiberglass pool cost, written in forty-five minutes at his kitchen table during the 2008 recession, has generated over thirty-five million dollars in revenue for that company. The article did what his sales team couldn’t. It answered the question at the exact moment the prospect was asking it.

This is what the “don’t show prices” argument systematically underestimates. It’s not the visible costs of showing prices that damage your business. It’s the invisible costs of not showing them.

Something I said to my senior-care client on that call was this: the first person that puts the price is the one that earns the trust. And I mean that. Whoever publishes first tells the market where the honest number lives. Everyone else spends their sales conversations reacting to that number instead of setting it.

The Marketing Versus Sales Frame

I want to introduce a framing I’ve been using with clients recently, because I think it clears up a lot of confusion in this debate.

Marketing’s job is to raise hands:

• The menu of services.
• The value proposition.
• The customer stories.
• The proof.
• The reasons a prospect should even consider you.

Marketing is content, positioning, and story. It’s what makes someone say, “I might be interested in this.” Marketing is the right message, at the right time to the right audience.

Sales’ job is to convert:

• The one-to-one relationship.
• The consultation.
• The tailoring of the offer to the specific situation.
• The persuasion.
• The trust-building that turns interest into a signed contract.

Both matter. Both are necessary. But they are not the same job.

Here is the question. Where does pricing fit?

The instinct of most service businesses is to put pricing in the Sales category. It’s part of the persuasion. It requires a conversation. It needs context. So we hide it from Marketing and hand it to Sales.

But watch what that actually does. It pushes every price-curious prospect through a Sales conversation before Marketing has even done its job. It uses up your Sales team’s most expensive time on prospects who haven’t self-qualified. And it deprives Marketing of one of the most powerful pieces of content it could publish.

The alternative framing is this. Pricing on your website is part of the menu. It is a Marketing function, not a Sales function. Its job is to help a prospect qualify themselves before Sales gets involved. Once the prospect knows they are in the right range, they raise their hand, and Sales does what only Sales can do. Build the relationship. Tailor the offer. Close the deal.

Marketing lists the price. Sales explains the value.

Those are not the same job, and one does not replace the other. What I hear inside the two objections above, gently, is the assumption that Sales has to do both. Which means Marketing never gets to help.

One of my colleagues, who spent years in newspaper A/B testing before joining our agency, once told me the same thing from a different angle. “Every time we added pricing, we had better qualified leads and better customers, and sales were up.” That’s not a coincidence. That’s Marketing finally doing its job.

What Buyers Are Actually Doing (The Data)

Let me bring numbers in, because the argument should not rest on intuition alone.

The TrustRadius 2026 B2B Buying Disconnect Report, which surveyed nearly nineteen hundred B2B buyers, found that “pricing transparency” has been the number one thing buyers want from vendor websites for four consecutive years. Forty-five percent named it their top wish. Eighty-one percent said they want to find pricing on their own without a sales rep. Sixteen percent said they will drop a vendor entirely if pricing is not easy to find.

Gartner’s 2026 sales survey tells the same story from another angle. Sixty-seven percent of B2B buyers now prefer a rep-free experience. They complete roughly eighty percent of the buying journey before ever contacting a vendor.

Forrester’s 2025 predictions go further. Their researchers project that more than half of one-million-dollar-plus B2B deals will now close through digital self-serve channels. Millennials and Gen Z, who are now seventy-one percent of B2B buyers, expect to configure, price, and check out largely without demos.

If those numbers feel like they only apply to B2B tech, remember this. They describe buyer psychology, not industry. A B2B buyer over the weekend is a B2C consumer. They come to your website with the same expectations they use at Amazon, at their bank, at every product page they see all day. The transparency they experience there sets the baseline for what they expect from you.

Nielsen Norman Group’s B2B usability research, based on hundreds of B2B websites, found that pricing is the single most-requested piece of information from buyers. When a site withholds it, users explicitly go to competitors’ sites to find it. That is the actual observed behavior in usability studies. Not a survey. Not a claim. What real users do when they can’t find a price.

And the consumer data reinforces it. Sixty-one percent of website visitors leave within five seconds when they can’t find the information they came for. That five-second window is where the “no price” strategy fails silently. You never see the person who bounced.

Also worth citing, Forrester’s 2024 State of Business Buying report: sixty-nine percent of B2B buyers say they see inconsistencies between what a company’s website says and what its salespeople tell them. That inconsistency is not a small problem. It is a trust breakdown. And it is the direct consequence of Marketing being deprived of the price.

The AI Search Angle

There is a newer angle to this that most business owners haven’t yet caught up with.

Google’s AI Overviews, Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Claude’s search integration are increasingly the first place buyers look for pricing information. They ask, “how much does home care cost in Grand Rapids?” and the AI answers.

Here is the important part. The AI is going to answer. The question is only whose numbers it uses.

Recent research from Wellows found that pages cited inside a Google AI Overview earn about thirty-five percent more clicks compared to pages not cited on the same query. Uncited pages, meanwhile, lose about sixty-one percent of their normal click share on AI-answered queries. Forty-seven percent of AI Overview citations come from pages ranked below position five in traditional search. In other words, a well-structured pricing page can win the citation even without a top-three ranking.

If your website publishes prices in a clear, well-structured format, AI answer engines cite your page. The buyer sees your numbers, alongside your name, at the moment they were asking. If your website doesn’t, the AI answers from somewhere else. A third-party aggregator, a Reddit thread, or a competitor’s website. Lyra put it bluntly in a 2025 piece on pricing-page SEO: “AI engines will answer the question. If they can’t find your answer, they’ll use someone else’s.”

Aleyda Solis, one of the most respected voices in SEO globally, has argued that content built around specificity, personal stake, and brand context, meaning real numbers, real examples, real customer situations, is what survives the AI-search era. Generic content collapses into a summary with no click. Specific, structured, price-anchored content becomes the citation.

The pricing page is no longer just a UX decision. It is now a visibility decision in an era where AI answers the question before your salesperson ever gets to.

The Human Touch, Reframed

I want to return to my media client’s objection now, that showing prices removes the chance for a salesperson to communicate value.

I want to challenge the assumption underneath this in the most respectful way I can.

The human touch is not the moment where a person reads a number aloud.

The human touch is what happens around the number: the discovery call where a caregiver explains how she is going to care for someone’s mother, the strategy conversation where a media buyer helps a business owner see how their ad campaign fits into a broader marketing plan, and the guide role. The person who helps the buyer make sense of a complex decision.

Publishing the number does not eliminate that role. It shifts where the price lands in the conversation.

Think about what actually happens when a salesperson reads the price to a prospect for the first time on a discovery call. The prospect is not learning the value at that moment. They are learning the price. If Marketing didn’t already communicate the value before this call, then this call is now doing two jobs at once. Establishing value and delivering the price. Which usually means Sales spends the first half of the call selling value, and the second half nervously delivering the number and watching the prospect’s face.

Compare that to a call where Sales knows the prospect has already seen the price on the site, already qualified themselves as being in the range, and shows up wanting to talk about fit, timing, and tailoring. Marketing already did the value work. Sales gets to do relationship work. That is what “human touch” actually looks like when Marketing is doing its job.

There is even research on this. A 2024 Aviso Studios analysis put it this way: “a number on your website carries way more authority than a number dropped on a discovery call.” A published price signals confidence. It says, “this is our price. We know it’s fair. We’re not making it up on the fly.” A number withheld until the sales call, by contrast, signals negotiability, which subtly erodes authority.

An older but instructive Springer study on eBay auctions found that higher-transparency listings earned about twelve percent price premiums over lower-transparency ones. Transparency and premium pricing are not opposites. They compound.

A more recent 2024 study in the Journal of Retailing on algorithmic pricing found the opposite of the transparency argument: opaque or dynamically-changing pricing reduces consumer trust in retailers. The trust cost of hidden pricing is well-documented in the academic literature. The trust cost of transparent pricing is not, and the human touch itself is diminished when the site and the sales team aren’t saying the same thing. Publishing the price is what aligns them.

B2C, B2B, Product, and Service

There is a set of questions inside this debate that most conversations skip past.

Does B2C Look Different From B2B?

At the surface, yes. B2C usually publishes prices. B2B often does not. But the underlying buyer psychology is converging. As Forrester’s data on Millennials and Gen Z shows, B2B buyers under forty-five are becoming the majority of decision-makers, and they buy the way they buy as consumers. They expect self-service, visible pricing, and the ability to configure and evaluate before they talk to sales.

The gap between B2C and B2B is not going away because B2C is becoming more relational. It is shrinking because B2B is becoming more self-serve.

Does Product Look Different From Service?

Yes, but less than most people think. Products universally show prices because the sale is transactional and the value is legible from a photo and a spec sheet. Services are more custom, more human, more tailored, and it is tempting to conclude that services should hide prices for that reason.

The Marcus Sheridan case is instructive here. A fiberglass pool is arguably as custom as any home service. It’s installed in a specific yard, sized to specific dimensions, with specific finishes and specific accessories. The price varies significantly. Sheridan didn’t publish a flat rate. He published a range and an explanation of the factors that move the number within that range. That was enough. That was what generated thirty-five million dollars.

The service versus product distinction matters less than the “range plus factors” habit matters.

Is There a Difference for Emergency-Oriented Services?

Yes, and it cuts strongly in favor of transparency. In an emergency, no one wants to negotiate. They want to know if you are in range. Emergency plumbers, urgent-care clinics, and after-hours services that publish clear rates win those calls at rates that businesses hiding prices cannot compete with. The urgency amplifies the transparency premium.

A Note on Our Region: Pricing and the West Michigan Mindset

Most of the businesses we serve are here in West Michigan, and this region has its own local wrinkle on the pricing debate that’s worth naming out loud.

If you’ve lived here for any length of time, you know the running joke. West Michigan is Dutch. The Dutch, culturally, have a reputation for being frugal, price-conscious, hard-working, and unbothered about looking cheap in service of a good deal. We joke about it. “Dutch treat.” “Dutch bingo.” The old line about the West Michigan homeowner who buys nice things but always at forty percent off. Coming from Costa Rica, I understand this. There’s always a clearance, a coupon, rewards, or a discount to be found, and the Dutch mentality wants exactly that.

Like most cultural stereotypes, this one is oversimplified. And like most stereotypes with staying power, it also has real truth to it. West Michigan buyers, on average, are careful with money. They compare, ask around, and talk to a neighbor before making a decision. The Dutch Reformed thrift ethic runs deep enough that even locals who aren’t Dutch by heritage often absorb the pattern.

That fact has been used in this region for decades as a reason not to publish prices. The reasoning goes: our customers are already too price-focused. If we show prices, we make it worse. They will compare us to the guy down the road and pick the cheaper one. We will be commoditized. We will lose the sale.

Here is the problem with that reasoning.

Your West Michigan customer will do the comparison anyway. They are Dutch. That’s the whole point. The question is not whether they will comparison-shop. They will. The question is where they will do it and with whose information.

If you don’t publish, they compare you to numbers they find in Facebook groups, on the local Reddit thread, in the coffee-shop conversation with a neighbor who says “oh yeah, I paid $X for that.” All of those numbers will be worse than yours. They’ll be old, out of context, or from a competitor who lowballed a job three years ago.

If you do publish, with clear ranges and the factors that drive the number, the West Michigan buyer’s comparison instinct actually works in your favor. They see a real number with a real explanation of what drives it. They compare it to competitors who don’t publish and can’t tell them why their number is different. Suddenly you’re not the expensive one being compared. You’re the honest one being trusted. In a region full of comparison-shoppers, the transparent business does not compete on being the cheapest. It competes on being the clearest. And clarity, in a culture that values not being taken for a ride, is worth more than most business owners realize.

The Warm-Lead Economics

There’s a piece of math I want business owners to run for themselves.

Take your current sales team’s typical week. How many hours does it spend on calls that turn into a signed contract? How many hours does it spend on calls that don’t? Of the calls that don’t convert, how many were with prospects who were never going to convert anyway, because they weren’t a real fit or weren’t in your price range?

Now imagine that half of those non-converting calls never happened, because the prospect saw the price on your website and self-qualified out. Your sales team’s time got refunded. Every remaining call was with a prospect who already knew the price and was still on the call. The conversion rate on those remaining calls would go up, sometimes dramatically, because you would only be talking to people already in your range.

Sales teams often argue that they want more leads. What they usually mean, if you press them, is that they want more good leads. Publishing the price is one of the most effective ways to filter out bad leads before they land on your calendar.

Now do the math on the other side. What is the current cost of a bad lead? Salary time. Opportunity cost of the good lead you didn’t call because you were on a bad one. Follow-up work. Proposals written for prospects who were never going to move. The invisible cost is real, and it is usually substantial.

There is a legitimate counter-argument here worth naming. HockeyStack Labs analyzed thirty-one million visitors across eighty B2B SaaS companies and found that pages with transparent pricing converted at 2.8 percent, while pages without it converted at 4.6 percent. Higher raw conversion rate for the sites hiding prices.

At first glance, that looks like a win for the “don’t show prices” camp. But the interpretation matters. HockeyStack itself pointed out that transparent pricing pages self-qualify visitors. Only the people who can afford the product get to the form. Opaque pages lure everyone, including tire-kickers who inflate the conversion rate but rarely close.

For most service businesses, that is not a bug. It is the entire point. A 4.6 percent rate on unqualified traffic can be worse for your business than a 2.8 percent rate on prospects who already know your range and want to move forward. Fewer inquiries. Faster sales cycles. Higher close rates. Less wasted time on both sides.

The businesses that thrive on transparent pricing understand that a “converted lead” is not the goal. A closed, right-fit customer is.

What Your Users Think When They Don’t See Prices

I want to name something I think business owners underappreciate.

When a user hits your website and can’t find pricing, they don’t think “I should call for a quote.” They think one of four things.

“This is probably too expensive.” Especially in B2B or high-ticket B2C. The unspoken price is usually assumed to be higher than the real price. Hidden pricing is often more damaging than a scary number would have been.

“They’re going to negotiate me.” Some buyers, especially professional buyers, hate negotiation. Hidden prices signal that a dance is coming. That itself is a bounce trigger.

“I don’t have time for this.” Buyers, particularly senior ones, don’t want to fill out a form and wait two business days to learn whether a service is even in their range. That friction alone eliminates prospects who might have loved your work.

“They don’t know their own price.” Rarely said out loud, but real. If a company hasn’t published a price, some buyers infer that the company is figuring pricing out on the fly, per customer. That signals lack of standards. Which signals lack of confidence. Which erodes authority.

The mental script a user runs when they can’t find your price is almost never the script you were hoping for.

To quote our friend Donald Miller, “if you confuse, you lose.” That’s true not only in story, but also in pricing. Not showing your price is a way to stay unclear, and it makes your customer think harder than they need to.

Companies That Made Pricing Transparency a Strategy

Some companies have built entire competitive advantages out of pricing transparency.

Basecamp (37signals) has published flat, public pricing for over two decades. Jason Fried has written openly about the philosophy behind it. His framing is that pricing transparency is about being on the customer’s side rather than extracting rent from them as they grow. When 37signals changes a price, they publish the reasoning, give at least ninety days of notice, and often grandfather existing customers.

Buffer took the same principle further. They publish not just their pricing but their revenue, their salaries, and their internal salary formulas. Their salary transparency system has been running publicly for over a decade. When Buffer first announced open salaries, they saw a two hundred and twenty-nine percent increase in job applications almost overnight. Their co-founder Joel Gascoigne put it simply: “Transparency breeds trust, and trust is the foundation of great teamwork.”

If those examples feel too tech to apply to your business, remember Sheridan. His company sold in-ground swimming pools. Physical, custom, high-ticket, deeply local. The principle transferred anyway.

For a serious pricing-strategy voice beyond marketing land, Hermann Simon’s Confessions of the Pricing Man is the book to read. Simon founded Simon-Kucher, the world’s top pricing consultancy. His central argument is that price is the most powerful profit lever in a business, and that clear price communication is essential to the value perception that makes higher prices possible.

You cannot have premium pricing without clear pricing. Silence is not premium. Silence is just silence.

What We’re Doing on the New Lifedge Site — Coming October 2026

For most of Lifedge’s nine years, we have been in the “contact us for a quote” camp. Not because I thought it was ideal, but because our services are custom and I was afraid a published number would either scare the wrong people off or box us into the wrong project.

I have changed my mind this year. The new Lifedge site, which launches in the next couple of months, will publish real numbers for our productized services, ranges for our project work, and starter package tiers that a buyer can look at and self-qualify against. We are not hiding anything.

I expect two things to happen. Some prospects who would have inquired will now self-select out. That is fine. Some prospects who never would have inquired, because they assumed we were “too expensive” or “not the right fit,” will now find themselves in the right room. That is the win.

The Case That Complicates This Argument

I want to be honest about a case in our own book that doesn’t fit cleanly into the argument I’ve been making.

A while back we redesigned a client’s website. Before the redesign, their site was essentially a catalog. Product listings, no prices, and a “request a quote” button on everything. That request-a-quote flow was generating a healthy volume of inquiries. The client felt like the marketing was working. They kept telling us they were getting a lot of requests.

We redesigned the site as a real e-commerce experience with published pricing. Buyers could see prices, add to cart, and complete a purchase without needing to talk to anyone.

Since the redesign, the client has reported that they are not seeing the sales volume they’d like. The quote requests dropped. The direct online sales have not come in at the volume the old inquiry stream implied.

I want to be careful about what I’m claiming and not claiming here.

The confounding variables are big. We changed more than one thing at once. Catalog to e-commerce is a fundamentally different buying experience. The user flow, the product presentation, the checkout process, the trust signals, and the fulfillment expectations all shifted at the same time. Attributing the outcome to “we added pricing” would be sloppy. The pricing was one variable among many.

There are also honest questions I don’t yet have answers to. Were the old “quote requests” ever qualified? Were the customers requesting quotes actually converting after the sales conversation, or were most of them curiosity clicks? Was there a segment of buyers who wanted the discovery-and-negotiation process itself, and who lost interest when the site turned into a self-serve transaction? Is the market for that particular category changing, independently of what happened on the site?

I don’t know yet. I’m still investigating. But I’m naming this because I want you to know I am not in a camp on this. I am in a season of testing.

The lesson I would draw so far is not “pricing was a mistake.” It’s this. If you change the pricing question on your website, be careful not to change the buying experience at the same time. Otherwise you can’t tell which move caused which result. The right test is the same site, same UX, same product presentation, but with pricing added. Not a full replatform.

Some businesses need the “request a quote” flow because their sale is genuinely relationship-led. Some businesses can move to a fully self-serve, priced flow. Most businesses probably belong somewhere in between, with published ranges or tier prices but a “let’s talk” option for buyers who want the conversation.

The intellectually honest position, I think, is not that transparent pricing always wins. It’s that most businesses, most of the time, are hiding prices for the wrong reasons, and the ones who publish thoughtfully win over the medium and long term. But specific cases can genuinely go the other way. I want to be one of the voices that names when they do.

How I Am Now Thinking About My Two Clients

Both of the clients I opened this piece with have real reasons for their positions. I want to be honest with them the way I want to be honest with you.

To the Senior-Care Founder

The fear that a family will compare your $46 to a competitor’s $44 and pick the cheaper one is real. But that comparison is happening whether you publish or not. It will happen in their minds. It is happening on Google and in the family’s group chat. The question is whether your website participates in that comparison with your best framing, or lets someone else’s version of your pricing anchor the family’s expectation.

Sheridan’s guidance, and mine, isn’t “post a flat rate and hope.” It is “post a range and the factors that move it.” “Our in-home care typically ranges from $X per day for short visits to $Y for full-time coverage. What drives the number is caregiver qualifications, shift length, medical complexity, and continuity of care.” That is not a commodity comparison. That is a value story with numbers in it. And it earns the trust before the family ever picks up the phone.

To the Media Client

The fear that pricing removes the human touchpoint is understandable, and I want to argue it is wrong in the direction that matters. Publishing prices does not remove the human touchpoint. It shifts what the human touchpoint is for. Instead of nervously delivering a number in the second half of a discovery call, your salespeople can spend that time talking about fit, campaign strategy, audience, creative, and outcome. That is the human touch. And it lands with more authority, not less, because the price already establishes your credibility.

Neither of you needs to publish a flat rate tomorrow. But consider what your website would look like if the first honest number a buyer saw was on your page, in your language, with your framing. Instead of on a competitor’s page. Or in an AI-generated summary that pulled the number from a Reddit thread you have never read.

FAQs (The Honest Ones)

I want you to be able to make your own decision here. So here are the questions I actually get asked most often, with the most honest answers I can give.

“What if my business really is custom and no two projects look alike?”

Publish factors, not a flat rate. Explain what makes a project cheaper or more expensive. Small vs. large. Simple vs. complex. Standard vs. specialty. That’s transparent without over-promising a number.

“What if I raise prices later? Won’t published prices lock me in?”

Change them. Publish the reasoning if it’s a significant change. 37signals has been raising prices publicly for two decades, and their customers love them for it. The reputational risk of raising a published price is smaller than the reputational risk of quietly quoting different numbers to different people.

“What if competitors use my prices against me?”

Some will. Most won’t, because most competitors are also hiding their prices. And if a competitor undercuts you on a public number, the buyer is going to have to justify the competitor’s cheaper price against your transparent value story. That comparison usually goes in your favor if your positioning is real.

“What if I only have a small budget and I can’t afford to lose any leads by scaring them off with price?”

This is the objection I take most seriously. It’s also usually a sign that the “leads” you’re afraid to lose weren’t going to close. Small budgets mean less waste, and hiding pricing usually generates more waste than publishing does. Try it. Give it a full quarter. Measure not just inquiries but qualified inquiries and close rate.

“What if I have a nonprofit and asking for a ‘price’ feels wrong?”

Publish something. Sponsorship tiers. Suggested giving amounts. What $50 does versus what $500 does. Silence around money is worse for nonprofits than it is for businesses, because the whole ask is inherently sensitive. Clarity is a gift to donors who genuinely want to know how they can help.

“What if I’m truly worried I’ll be commoditized?”

Then your positioning needs work. If price is the only thing your buyers can use to differentiate you, that’s a marketing problem, not a pricing problem. Publish the price and use the visibility to force yourself to make your value story sharper.

“What if my sales team hates this?”

Ask them why. If the answer is “we like the negotiation,” that’s worth challenging. If the answer is “we like being the ones to reveal the price so we can frame it,” that is a Marketing job that Sales has quietly absorbed. Take it back and let Sales do actual sales.

“What if my industry doesn’t do this?”

The businesses that broke industry norms on pricing usually became the leaders in their industry. Sheridan was the first in pools. 37signals was one of the first in SaaS. Buffer was one of the first in agencies to publish salaries and revenue. The pattern is fairly clear. First mover on transparency tends to win the trust and the traffic. You just have to be willing to be first.

Something I’m Testing on Myself

The question I asked at the beginning of this piece is one I also ask about my own sales meetings.

When I show pricing during a meeting, versus when I don’t, is there a difference in whether that meeting turns into a signed engagement?

I don’t have that data cleanly yet. But I am going to start tracking it. Every discovery call I do for the next quarter, I’m going to note when in the conversation the price came up, whether it came from me proactively or from the prospect asking, and whether the call ended in a signed engagement.

If you’re a business owner reading this and you’re wrestling with the same question, that same test applies to your sales meetings. Start noticing the pattern. When did the price come up? Did that call close? Did it close faster? Were you happier at the end of it?

We tend to trust the intuition that “letting them feel the value first, then dropping the number” is the safer play. Test it against your own conversations. You might find you’re right. You might find you’re wrong. Either way, you’ll be operating on data instead of habit. That is the honest version of this argument.

A Bet, Not a Rule

I want to close by saying this is not a rule.

It is a bet. The bet is that over the next five years, buyer behavior will continue to move toward self-service, transparency, and rep-free evaluation; that AI search will make hidden-pricing sites systematically less visible; and that the businesses that publish first, publish well, and use pricing content to educate their market will win a compounding stream of trust and traffic that hidden-pricing businesses cannot replicate. That bet could be wrong. Some categories might genuinely be different. Some businesses might be so relationship-driven that transparency actively hurts them. I am open to being wrong in specific cases.

But when I look at the four consecutive years of buyer surveys, the AI search behavior, the sixty-nine percent of B2B buyers reporting website-versus-salesperson inconsistency, the twelve percent price premium transparent listings earn in academic studies, and the businesses in our own book that are quietly outperforming their industries, every arrow is pointing the same direction.

The transparency bet has been the right bet for years. In the AI era, it is becoming harder to justify the opposite one.

Sheridan wrote his most valuable article in forty-five minutes at a kitchen table. If you spend the next hour writing yours, you will not lose. You might even win the next five years.

If you want to think through what a “range plus factors” pricing page could look like for your business, or you want a second set of eyes on the version you are drafting, reply to this post or send us a note. We would be glad to walk through it with you.