Price · 04
Put a starting price on the page. Then defend it.
If the buyer has to write to learn what it costs to start, you have already lost the serious ones.
25 Aug 2026 · 6 min
04The form is doing the wrong job
Most service sites in our market treat price as a conversation. The page is a mood. The form is a gate. Someone on the other side will “come back with a number”. The serious buyer already had a band in mind. They wanted to see if you live in it. You made them wait for a human to say what the page could have said on a Sunday.
A starting number is a filter
A starting number is not a trap. It is a filter. The people it filters out were never going to be a good job. The people it keeps still have questions: what is included, what moves the number, how long it takes. Those questions belong next to the number, not in a follow-up that arrives two days later.
A starting number is not a trap. It is a filter. The people it filters out were never going to be a good job.
What the number has to name
Name what the floor buys. A marketing site is not a shop. A shop is not a custom program. If your floor is a five-page site with a form and a week of copy, write that. If it excludes photography, plugins you do not own, or a week of training, write that too. Ambiguous floors become fights in week three.
Competitors can see it. Good.
Studios hide prices because a competitor might screenshot them. The competitor already knows. The buyer does not. If your only defence is secrecy, you do not have a defence. You have a delay. We put starting prices on this site because we would rather lose a tyre-kicker in ten seconds than spend a Thursday writing a quote they will never open.
The reply still has to match
Publishing a floor and then inventing a second price in mail is worse than hiding it. The page made a promise. The reply has to keep it or explain, in one paragraph, why this job is not the floor. Scope, not theatre. If the job is a shop with three gateways and a warehouse feed, say so, and say the number that belongs to that job.
VAT is not a footnote if you serve Estonia
If you sell in Estonia, the buyer needs to know whether the number is with VAT. Write it once, next to the floor, in the language of the page. Do not bury it in a PDF. A number that changes after they write is not a number. It is a surprise.
