It is the page that gets read
Watch how a real evaluation goes. Someone lands on the homepage, skims it, and goes to pricing. Not because they are ready to buy, but because pricing is the fastest way to answer the two questions the homepage was vague about: is this for a company like mine, and roughly what is this going to cost. Pricing answers both in a way marketing copy cannot, because it is the only page where the company has committed to something.
Which means the pricing page is doing positioning work whether or not anybody treated it as a positioning artefact. Usually nobody did. It was built once, by the growth team, in a hurry, and it has been inherited ever since.
What the structure says
Before a visitor reads a single number, the shape of the page has already told them several things. These are the signals, and they are all read as claims about who you are.
- The metric you charge on says what you think you are worth. Per seat says you are a tool people use. Per unit of work says you are infrastructure. Per outcome says you are confident, and invites a fight about attribution. Changing this metric is a repositioning, not a pricing change.
- The number of tiers says who you are built for. Three tiers with a free entry point says self-serve and product-led. Two tiers and an enterprise call says you have a sales team and a floor. One price says you have made a decision about your market and are not hedging.
- The order of the feature table says what you believe your value is. Buyers read the first four rows and skim the rest. If the first four rows are integrations and the differentiator is on row eleven, the page is arguing for somebody else's product.
- The tier names say who the buyer is supposed to be. Starter, Growth and Enterprise is a size ladder. Names that describe a job rather than a size say something more specific and are harder to write, which is why almost nobody does it.
The cost of contact us
Hiding all pricing behind a form is a defensible choice in some markets and an expensive default in most. It is defensible when the work is genuinely bespoke and the range is so wide that a number would misinform. It is a default when nobody wanted to have the argument about what to publish.
The cost is asymmetric and it is paid by the buyer you most want. A senior person evaluating four options does not book four calls to find out which are in range. They eliminate the ones that made it hard and take calls with the ones that did not. Contact us does not protect your price, it just moves you later in the shortlist, or off it.
The middle option is an order of magnitude rather than a quote. Publish a range, say plainly what moves a project to the top of it, and say what the range excludes. That gives a buyer enough to rule you in or out without committing you to a number before you have read their situation. It costs you nothing you were actually holding, and it removes a meeting whose only purpose was to answer a question you could have answered on a page.
What to publish alongside the number
A number on its own creates as many questions as it answers. Three things travel with it and are almost always missing.
- What is excluded. The single most common source of a bad first invoice is a pass-through cost the buyer assumed was inside the fee. Listing exclusions in public reads as confidence and prevents the conversation that damages trust later.
- What moves the price. Naming the two or three variables that decide where in the range a piece of work lands lets a buyer self-assess, and it makes the range look considered rather than arbitrary.
- What happens next. Whether the number is a quote, an estimate or a starting point, and what has to happen before it becomes committed. Buyers are not annoyed by an estimate. They are annoyed by discovering that a number they planned around was never a number.
The internal test
Take your pricing page to your own sales team and ask them one question: when a deal goes wrong on price, which line on this page did the customer misread. There is almost always one, and it is almost always the same one, and it has almost always been the same one for a year.
Then ask a second question. If a competitor's pricing page had your numbers on it and yours had theirs, would the pages still describe two different companies. If the answer is no, your pricing page is a table, not an artefact, and it is spending the attention of your most serious readers on nothing.
The practice this studio holds itself to
We publish ranges for our own work, with what they exclude and what moves them, on the pages where the work is described. Not because the number is precise, but because asking a founder to spend a meeting finding out whether we are within an order of magnitude of their budget is a tax on their time that exists to protect our negotiating position.
It is difficult to sell clear communication from behind a form. That is most of the argument.