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Being clear about how you price protects your calendar and your margins.
Plenty of B2B service firms treat pricing as something a buyer has to earn. There's a "Contact us for a quote" button on every page and not a word about cost elsewhere, as if money can only come up after the third call. Hidden pricing does lose you work, but not quite for the reason usually given.
The standard advice is to publish your prices, and a starting figure is one legitimate way to handle it; some firms do it well. But the damage is rarely done by the missing number. It's done when a buyer can't tell whether you work with organisations like theirs, or what they'd be letting themselves in for.
Hidden pricing fills the calendar with the wrong meetings
A buyer who can't place you either leaves or enquires to find out. The ones who leave are often the ones you wanted: busy people with a budget to allocate, who move on to a firm that makes the fit obvious. The ones who stay include the tyre-kickers, with a small budget and a large problem, who take up a discovery call and a proposal before telling you it's way out of their range. The calendar fills with meetings that look like demand and mostly aren't.
Explain what makes a project bigger or smaller
The usual objection is that every project is bespoke, so there's no price to give. True, which is why the explanation matters: to judge fit, a buyer mostly needs to know what makes a project like theirs bigger or smaller.
Take a website. The cost tends to move with the number of distinct page types, how much of the content has to be written from scratch, what the site has to connect to (a booking system or a CRM, say) and whether the brand work is already done. Put your version of that in plain sentences and a buyer can place their project before anyone has spent time on it.
Show how quoting works and what a proposal includes
Much of the hesitation is about what happens next. Buyers want to know how many conversations it takes to get a proposal, and whether the fee in it will be fixed or an estimate. Tell them, and show what a proposal contains: the scope, deliverables, timeline, exclusions and payment stages.
A page on how you work can carry all of this without a figure on it:
Who the service is for, and who it isn't for
Work you've done for similar clients
What makes a project bigger or smaller
How quoting works, and what a proposal includes
One clear next step, such as booking a short first call
Qualify honestly, and early
Qualifying starts in the page copy, which tells a buyer roughly what you cost whether you mean it to or not. Say who you usually work with and what you do well, and some visitors will rule themselves out. That's the copy doing its job.
The form is where many firms try to go further, usually with a compulsory budget field. That's a blunt tool: plenty of good buyers don't have a number yet, and some will leave rather than guess. The first reply does the job better. Answer promptly with the two or three questions that decide fit, and say plainly if you're not the right firm. If you know who is, tell them.
Then a short first call, where budget is a conversation rather than a dropdown and you can be straight about what pushes the cost up. If budget and brief don't match, you both find out before anyone writes a proposal.
If your enquiries keep ending with "that's way out of our range", list the things that most change the size of a job in your business, then check how many of them your services page mentions.
Related Brainstorm services and work
Website project details · Website and brand services · Discuss scope and fit
Updated 24 September 2026. Dave Curtin, founder and Creative Director of Brainstorm, leads website strategy, brand direction and technical delivery for Brainstorm clients.
Being clear about how you price protects your calendar and your margins.
Plenty of B2B service firms treat pricing as something a buyer has to earn. There's a "Contact us for a quote" button on every page and not a word about cost elsewhere, as if money can only come up after the third call. Hidden pricing does lose you work, but not quite for the reason usually given.
The standard advice is to publish your prices, and a starting figure is one legitimate way to handle it; some firms do it well. But the damage is rarely done by the missing number. It's done when a buyer can't tell whether you work with organisations like theirs, or what they'd be letting themselves in for.
Hidden pricing fills the calendar with the wrong meetings
A buyer who can't place you either leaves or enquires to find out. The ones who leave are often the ones you wanted: busy people with a budget to allocate, who move on to a firm that makes the fit obvious. The ones who stay include the tyre-kickers, with a small budget and a large problem, who take up a discovery call and a proposal before telling you it's way out of their range. The calendar fills with meetings that look like demand and mostly aren't.
Explain what makes a project bigger or smaller
The usual objection is that every project is bespoke, so there's no price to give. True, which is why the explanation matters: to judge fit, a buyer mostly needs to know what makes a project like theirs bigger or smaller.
Take a website. The cost tends to move with the number of distinct page types, how much of the content has to be written from scratch, what the site has to connect to (a booking system or a CRM, say) and whether the brand work is already done. Put your version of that in plain sentences and a buyer can place their project before anyone has spent time on it.
Show how quoting works and what a proposal includes
Much of the hesitation is about what happens next. Buyers want to know how many conversations it takes to get a proposal, and whether the fee in it will be fixed or an estimate. Tell them, and show what a proposal contains: the scope, deliverables, timeline, exclusions and payment stages.
A page on how you work can carry all of this without a figure on it:
Who the service is for, and who it isn't for
Work you've done for similar clients
What makes a project bigger or smaller
How quoting works, and what a proposal includes
One clear next step, such as booking a short first call
Qualify honestly, and early
Qualifying starts in the page copy, which tells a buyer roughly what you cost whether you mean it to or not. Say who you usually work with and what you do well, and some visitors will rule themselves out. That's the copy doing its job.
The form is where many firms try to go further, usually with a compulsory budget field. That's a blunt tool: plenty of good buyers don't have a number yet, and some will leave rather than guess. The first reply does the job better. Answer promptly with the two or three questions that decide fit, and say plainly if you're not the right firm. If you know who is, tell them.
Then a short first call, where budget is a conversation rather than a dropdown and you can be straight about what pushes the cost up. If budget and brief don't match, you both find out before anyone writes a proposal.
If your enquiries keep ending with "that's way out of our range", list the things that most change the size of a job in your business, then check how many of them your services page mentions.
Related Brainstorm services and work
Website project details · Website and brand services · Discuss scope and fit
Updated 24 September 2026. Dave Curtin, founder and Creative Director of Brainstorm, leads website strategy, brand direction and technical delivery for Brainstorm clients.