Should you put your prices
on your website?

The short answer, then the honest part

Should your prices go on your website? For most trades, yes — at least a range, a starting number, or a service-call fee. A caller who can see roughly where they'll land before they dial is a caller who's already halfway to hiring you.

That's the clean answer. Here's the honest part it leaves out: some work genuinely can't carry a fixed number, and pretending it can is its own kind of lie. So the real question isn't "price or no price." It's whether you can hand the caller a way to see roughly where they land. Almost everyone can. What you hand them just changes by trade.

The fork: a repeatable unit vs. genuinely custom scope

Look at your own work and ask one thing: does it have a repeatable unit?

A service call. A diagnostic fee. A tune-up. A per-square or per-foot rate. A flat-rate menu of common jobs. If your work has a unit like that, you can publish it, and a caller can do the rough math in their head before they pick up the phone.

Then there's the other side. A full remodel. A restoration where you can't know the damage until you open the wall. A build where the scope is genuinely different every time. Slap a single number on that and you're lying either to the customer or to yourself — probably both.

But watch the trap here. "Every job is different" is true for the custom trades. It's also the exact sentence a lot of guys hide behind who could post something and just don't want to. Only you know which of those you are.

Because even the truly custom trades can publish something true:

That last one is the sleeper. You don't owe anyone an exact quote for a job you haven't seen. You can tell them what drives it: square footage, access, how bad it is when you open it up, materials. That's not a price. It's a map. It does the same job — it lets the caller see where they'd land.

You're really asking whether transparency costs you deals

Here's the fear underneath the question, said plainly: post a number and you scare off the fat-margin job, or you hand a competitor the figure he needs to undercut you by fifty bucks.

So do the actual math on it.

A posted range mostly filters the callers who were never going to hire you at your rate. The ones shopping for the cheapest body on the job. The ones who'd have wasted forty minutes of your evening and then ghosted. That's not a lost deal. That's a saved hour and a phone that rings with people who already know what you cost and called anyway.

The caller who's ready to pay for real work isn't scared off by a real number. He's relieved to finally find one. He's been calling guys all day who won't tell him anything until they've got his address and a slot on the calendar, and he's tired of it.

As for the competitor reading your site — he can call you as a fake customer and get your number in ten minutes anyway. A price on a page doesn't hand him anything he couldn't already get. What it hands you is the caller who chose you after seeing it.

What the numbers say (roofing, specifically)

There's some survey data here. Treat it as one signal, not gospel — and know who paid for it, because that changes how much weight it carries.

In a survey of roofing homeowners fielded in fall 2024 and published by Roofing Contractor magazine's 2025 Homeowners Survey, 78% said they'd be more likely to call a roofing contractor that shows pricing on its website. In that same survey, 76% of roofing contractors said they don't feature pricing on their site. That gap — most customers want it, most contractors won't do it — is the argument, in two numbers.

Now the honest footnote: that survey didn't disclose how many people it asked, and it was co-sponsored by a company that sells pricing software, so it had a horse in the race. And it's roofing homeowners — not plumbing, not electrical, not restoration. Don't stretch it onto your trade without a grain of salt.

One more, broader: a Housecall Pro survey of 1,040 U.S. homeowners, published December 2025, found 97% said they expect a contractor to provide transparent pricing before they decide to hire. That one's vendor-commissioned too — Housecall Pro sells software to contractors, so read it the same way. Still, the direction of every number here points the same way, and it matches what you already know from your own phone.

Post what's true for your trade

None of this is a rule. If your work is genuinely custom and a range would mislead people, don't post one — post what is true instead: a minimum, an hourly rate, a plain map of what drives the cost. If you've got a repeatable unit, put it up and let it pre-qualify the phone for you.

The only real mistake is the silent site that makes every caller do the interrogation before they get a single number. That's the one that sends them to the next guy.

We publish every one of our own prices, right on the page, for exactly the reasons above. You can look at how we lay it out here: our pricing page.

One line to ask yourself

"Does my work have a repeatable unit — a service call, a rate, a flat-rate menu — or is every job genuinely different?"

Next: Say It, Don't Type It — the free recorder in your pocket that turns a job you did into words for your site.