Publish your prices or quote only on request
Decide whether to publish your rates by testing one thing first: whether your price can survive being read by a stranger with no salesperson present.
The decision underneath the decision
Most owners frame this as transparency against protecting margin. That is not the real question. The real question is whether your price can survive being read by a stranger with nobody there to explain it. If the number only makes sense after twenty minutes of context then publishing it will lose you enquiries rather than win them.
So the choice is sequential rather than binary. Publishing a rate forces you to fix the scope behind it first. Quoting on request lets the scope stay loose and charges you for that looseness in sales time. Both are defensible positions. Only one of them is available to a business that has not standardised what it sells.
What publishing costs you
Publishing does not remove the need for a sales process on complex work. It removes the need for one on simple work. Expect to keep both paths running and expect the published path to carry the smaller end of your range.
The costs are real. Competitors read your page on the first day and price against it. You lose the ability to charge one buyer more than another for the same scope which is how many businesses quietly protect their margin. You have to honour the number even on the week when you are busy. You also have to decide whether the published figure sits before or after GST at 18% and then display that consistently. A buyer who discovers the tax only at invoice stage treats it as a hidden charge regardless of the law.
Who should keep quoting on request
Do not publish rates when your cost depends on conditions you cannot see from the website. Interior fit outs. Fabrication. Civil work. Freight. Anything where a site visit changes the figure by a multiple should stay on request. A published number in these trades becomes an anchor the buyer refuses to move off even after you discover the real conditions.
A business priced below its own sustainable level should also not publish. Publishing locks in a number you need to raise. Fix the pricing privately first. The third case is a business selling through channel partners or resellers at different rates. A public price undercuts your own partners and they will stop selling for you. The fourth is a business in the middle of repositioning upward. Publish the old rate and you will be arguing with it for two years.
How published pricing actually works
Productise before you publish. Take the work you repeat most often and fix the deliverable in countable units. Then price the unit rather than the project. A number against six posts a month is publishable. A number against social media management is not.
Put the exclusions in the first line beside the figure rather than below it. State what the buyer still has to supply. State what is billed separately. Then give the price a validity period so cost changes do not trap you. Keep a named route for genuinely custom work so the published page does not have to cover everything. Buyers accept that bespoke work is quoted. They resent being made to ask for the price of something standard.
Whether publishing is working
The metric that matters is sales hours per won deal. Published pricing earns its place by removing conversations with people who were never going to buy. If your team still spends the same hours per win then the page has not changed anything.
The metric that flatters is enquiry volume. It usually falls after publishing because the budget mismatches filter themselves out. Owners read the fall as failure and take the prices down again. Watch qualified enquiries instead and watch how many arrive already knowing the number.
The mistake almost everyone makes
The common error is publishing a starting from figure that nobody can actually buy. It reads as a price and functions as bait. The buyer arrives anchored to the lowest number in your range and every real quote then feels like an increase. You have created the price objection yourself and you have to overcome it in every conversation.
This is expensive because it damages trust at the exact moment you were trying to build it. Publish a number somebody can pay. If the entry package is thin then say what it excludes in the same breath. A small honest scope at a real price converts better than a large vague scope at a fictional one.
A note on how you display tax
Whether you show prices inclusive or exclusive of tax carries compliance consequences and those differ by what you sell and to whom. The mechanism is simply that the published figure and the invoice must tell the same story. A qualified tax professional should confirm the correct treatment and display for your business before you publish.
This guide explains how something works. It is not legal, tax or financial advice, and rules change. Confirm anything regulatory with a qualified professional before you act on it.