Why we publish prices in a market that quotes everything

Ask what a landing page costs and you will usually be asked to book a call.

There is a reason for that, and it is not entirely cynical. Development work genuinely varies. The same three words — "a booking system" — can mean a weekend or a quarter, and quoting without asking questions is how people lose money.

We still publish the number. Here is the reasoning.

The hidden price is a filter that filters the wrong people

When the price is behind a call, the people who book the call are the ones with time and tolerance for a sales process. That is not the same set as the people with the budget and the need.

Somebody who needs a pricing page experiment done next week, knows roughly what it should cost, and wants to get on with it will not book a discovery call to find out. They will go somewhere that told them.

"It depends" is often a way of not deciding

Some work genuinely cannot be priced from a list. A whole website, a migration, a marketplace — the scope has to be established before the number means anything. We have a separate shape for that: you describe what you need, and sellers quote against your description.

But a great deal of work is not like that. A consent banner that satisfies GDPR. A caching layer in front of an LLM call. A Stripe integration with webhooks handled properly. These have an obvious end, a recognisable shape, and a price that experienced people could tell you within about ten percent.

Saying "it depends" about those is not caution. It is declining to commit.

Where the numbers come from

They are not invented, and they are not our opinion of what the work is worth. They are derived from what sellers in the market actually charge for that scope. A price nobody will work for is not a price, it is a advertisement for disappointment — the buyer arrives expecting one thing and every quote comes back at double.

What this costs us

Two things, honestly.

First, we lose the deals where the right answer really was "it depends" and the published number anchored someone to a figure that was wrong for their case. We mitigate that by being clear about which things are fixed-scope services and which are projects, but the anchoring is real.

Second, published prices are comparable, and comparison is uncomfortable when you are on the expensive side of it. That is the point — but it is a cost, not a free win.

The test we hold it to

Can someone who has never spoken to us find out what their thing costs, in under a minute, without giving us their email?

If the answer is no, we have built the thing we were trying not to build.