Plenty of B2B websites keep prices off the page and replace them with a “contact us for pricing” message. In our opinion though, we recommend clients at least publish something.
It doesn’t have to be a full price list or a dedicated pricing page, but it should give a buyer enough to know whether they’re in the right place before they pick up the phone. A price range usually does that job. Although there are a few situations that warrant for leaving prices off altogether.
Why buyers look for the price first
Buyers want to do more of their research on their own. In a survey published in 2025, Gartner, which sells research and advice to sales leaders, found that 61% of B2B buyers preferred a buying experience without a sales rep.
The survey wasn’t specifically about pricing, but price is one of the hardest things to research on your own when nobody publishes it. On a buying committee, it’s often the finance lead who goes looking for it, as mentioned in our B2B SEO basics article.
We see the same thing in our own enquiries. At least 25% of prospects ask us for “ballpark pricing” before they’ll commit to a conversation. They don’t want to waste their time, and that’s fair.
The odd part is what happens when we turn the question around. Ask about their budget and many prospects go quiet. It’s as if they believe we are trying to find out how much we can extract from them. In reality, we’re simply trying to work out how elaborate of a solution makes sense. In automotive terms, we want to know whether they’re shopping for a Ford or a Ferrari.
A price on your website answers that question before either side has to ask it.
What publishing a price does for you
Published prices work in your favour as well as the buyer’s.
- They set expectations. A buyer who has seen your range arrives knowing roughly what your proposal will say.
- They turn away budgets that don’t fit. Neither side spends time on an initial conversation that was never going to work with their budget.
- They anchor early conversations. Some clients want a figure on the page so the first call starts from a shared number.
- They can win work. A smaller, more adaptable firm can often deliver custom work more cost-effectively than a larger competitor. An attractive published price makes that advantage visible.
The objections, and which ones hold up
When we raise pricing with owners and sales teams, the same few concerns come up. Most of them are weaker than they first appear.
“Competitors will see our prices”
This is the one we hear most, and we’ve watched a client test it with real sales numbers.
The client ran a B2B e-commerce site selling everything from office supplies to office equipment. There were pens starting at under $1 as well as machines priced around the $100,000 mark. Pricing was heavily customized by for their clients, with twelve price tables in all. One was a public price list for new customers. The other eleven were preset lists for long-time, vetted customers, shown only once they logged in.
Products under $5,000 showed their price publicly, and anything above that said “call for pricing”, since many of the higher-priced items had margins the client was open to adjusting.
Sales were great upon launch. But 3 to 4 months later, management still worried that public pricing gave away too much to competitors. Against our recommendation, they had us hide the pricing, requiring every visitor to log in before seeing a price.
Traffic and sales dropped, as we expected. Creating an account and waiting for approval was too much of a barrier for most visitors, when a competitor’s site showed prices instantly. Hiding prices also took the products out of Google Shopping, which requires a price for each product that matches the landing page. The experiment lasted about a month before the numbers made the case, and the client switched public pricing back on.
At the end of the day, customers find out your price at some point. Keeping it secret doesn’t do anyone any favours.
“Every quote is different”
For most B2B companies, nearly every sale is custom. Clients rarely fit a predefined package exactly, and even when they do, they often want add-ons or customizations. Buyers generally understand that, so knowing that everyone pays a different price is less of a concern than sales teams expect.
There is a real trade-off, though. A range invites some buyers to negotiate, while a fixed package price tends to suggest “take it or leave it”. That’s worth weighing, but it’s rarely a reason to show nothing.
The middle ground between a price list and “contact us”
Publishing prices isn’t all or nothing. A range on a service page can do as much as a full pricing page. These are the options we’ve built or recommended.
From Most Open to Least
- 1Full public price list
Every product priced and visible to every visitor. - 2Prices up to a threshold
Prices shown below a set amount, with “call for pricing” above it. - 3Price ranges
Where most work lands, without committing to a quote. - 4Prices only after login
Nothing visible until a buyer has an approved account. - 5Contact us for pricing
No number at all until the buyer gets in touch.
- Price ranges. These are the best way to tell buyers what to expect. A range doesn’t hold your feet to the fire if a client’s requirements turn out much bigger than anticipated, and it still weeds out buyers who aren’t a fit. Our article on writing copy for B2B buyers makes the same point about replacing “competitive pricing” with a real number.
- A price threshold. Show prices up to a set amount, and switch to “call for pricing” above it, where margins and quantities vary most.
- Customer price lists behind a login. These suit negotiated pricing for established customers. They work alongside public pricing, not as a replacement for it.
- Price estimators. We’ve built these on a few client sites, and they help in the right setting. Be careful with them in some of the more technical industries, though.
When an estimator backfires
An estimator only works when the buyer can make a decent estimate of the inputs. Where buyers are unlikely to know the quantities required, or the criteria that move the price widely, the tool sets up disappointment. They put their faith in the calculator, then reach out and learn the real price is significantly higher than what the tool showed.
When to leave prices off
Some situations do call for keeping prices off the website.
- Distribution rules. Some manufacturers and distributors aren’t allowed to show pricing online. In those cases the answer is clear-cut.
- A range too wide to help. We’ve recommended that some clients remove pricing because the range was so broad that visitors assumed the worst case. Service firms that work with very different sizes of client run into this. An accountant might charge a few thousand dollars every year for a simple corporate tax return, but $5,000 to $10,000 a month to act as a fractional CFO. A client looking for either service could be confused or put off by seeing the other end of that range.
Publish a Price When
- Most of your work falls in a predictable range
- You’re the cost-effective option
- You want to filter out budgets that won’t fit
Leave It Off When
- Distribution rules don’t allow it
- The range is too wide to help
- Each type of client would see the wrong end
What we do on our own site
We publish our own price ranges for the same reasons we recommend them. They’re there to give prospects an idea of what our proposals are likely to say, and to turn away budgets that wouldn’t be a good fit, which saves everyone time. Our article on what a B2B website costs in Canada explains what drives the numbers.
A published range doesn’t do all the work, because not every prospect reads it. We’ve even had a few prospects tick a box on our enquiry form confirming at least $10,000 budgeted for the project, then they were still surprised that our pricing didn’t start below that level.
That’s why we still raise pricing early in the first call to make sure everyone is aligned.
When a prospect asks for a ballpark, we won’t quote a number on a phone call or in a first email. We do explain where most of our projects land.
- Most B2B website projects fall between $15,000 and $30,000.
- E-commerce and custom applications usually run beyond that, sometimes as high as $100,000.
- Smaller projects can fall between $5,000 and $10,000, but they are simpler in scope and provide only a basic point of presence, not a full B2B site.
Although few of are projects are at the high end of that range, we mention it on purpose. It hints that we are capable of more complex work, even when a prospect’s project isn’t as elaborate. It provides some reassurance their project isn’t at the edge of what we can handle.
A proposal without a conversation
One recent prospect didn’t want to engage with us at all until we’d sent a proposal. That isn’t how we normally work, but the project looked like a good fit, so we agreed.
Without a discovery call, the proposal had to be built on the client’s list of asks, rather than on a solution we’d helped shape. Because we quote fixed prices, we priced on the higher side to leave a buffer for the unknowns.
The assumptions and exclusions section also ran long, so nobody would assume a feature was included when it wasn’t. The client saved some time by not talking to us, but they didn’t get the most tailored proposal for their situation.
Give buyers a number to work with
Buyers will find out your price eventually. Telling them up front, even as a range, saves both sides from conversations that go nowhere, and it keeps buyers from leaving for a competitor who already answered the question. Hold back only when distribution rules require it or a range is too wide to mean anything.
If you’re deciding what your own site should say about pricing, feel free to book a discovery call. It’s a useful conversation about your project, with no pitch, and no pressure.
