Why we publish our prices when most studios will not

The standard argument against publishing prices goes like this: every project is different, a number without context is misleading, and a discovery call lets you explain the value before the buyer anchors on a figure. Every part of that is true. It is also, in practice, a way of finding out what a customer can afford before deciding what to charge them.

What hiding the price actually does

A hidden price does three things, and only one of them helps the buyer. It filters out people who cannot afford the work, which saves the studio time. It lets the quote flex to the buyer rather than to the job. And it delays the conversation everybody actually wants to have until after somebody has sat through a call.

The second one is the problem. If two businesses ask for the same five-page website and one of them mentions a funding round, a flexible quote will price those differently. Nothing about the work changed. That is not value-based pricing, it is just charging what the room will bear, and the only reason it survives is that nobody can compare notes.

What it cost us to publish

• We lost the ability to price a job by who is asking. That is the point, and it is still occasionally painful.
• We get compared to $5 marketplaces by people who were never going to buy from us, and we spend time explaining a difference the price alone does not explain.
• Our own packages have to be honest about their limits, because a published spec list is a promise anybody can hold us to.
• Every price rise is visible. There is no quiet drift upward when nobody is looking.

What it bought

Enquiries arrive pre-qualified in a way that has nothing to do with budget filtering. People write having already read what a package contains, so the first message is "does the Platinum tier cover a second language on the packaging" rather than "how much for a logo". That is a much better first message, and it means the first reply can be useful instead of exploratory.

It also settled an internal argument permanently. When the spec is public, a salesperson cannot promise something the package does not include, and a designer cannot be asked to absorb it. The page is the referee.

The one thing we will not put on a page

Custom work still gets a custom number. A twelve-language e-commerce build, a brand architecture project across four sub-brands, an app with a payments integration — those get scoped and quoted, because a published figure for them would be fiction. What we will not do is take a job that plainly matches a listed package and quote it differently because of who asked.