Why we publish our prices
Most marketing agencies will not quote until you are on a call. Ours are on the website with a builder that totals them up, and you can check out without speaking to anybody.
That is a deliberate choice with real costs attached, and it is worth explaining both sides.
What hiding prices is actually for
It is not usually about bespoke work, which is the stated reason.
It allows the price to vary by customer. If a business looks like it can afford more, it gets quoted more. That is the main reason and it is rarely admitted.
It forces a sales conversation. A call lets somebody build rapport, handle objections and close. Pricing on the site means some people decide against you before any of that, which is a real loss from the agency’s point of view.
It hides being expensive. Some agencies are not expensive for what they do, and some are. A call is where the second kind explains why.
None of those are outrageous. Varying price by customer is normal in plenty of industries. But they are the reasons, and “every business is unique” usually is not.
What it costs you to hide them
Most people will not book a call to find out a price. They assume expensive and move on. You never learn that they existed.
It filters for the wrong thing. The people who will book a call to find out a price are the people with time and patience, not necessarily the ones who would be good customers.
It starts the relationship with something withheld. Small, but it sets a tone, and the tone matters more in a service where trust is the product.
What it costs us to publish them
Being honest about the downside.
We lose people who would have bought. Somebody sees $499 a month, decides it is too much, and leaves. On a call we might have explained what it covers and they might have agreed. We never get that chance.
We cannot charge more to businesses that could pay more. A multi location practice pays the same as a one person operation for the same service. That is money left on the table and we accept it.
We compete on a number out of context. Someone can compare our $499 against somebody else’s $299 without knowing that the second one runs campaigns in their own ad account, takes a percentage of spend, or does the setup once and nothing afterwards. We lose some of those comparisons on price alone.
Why we do it anyway
It respects your time. You can find out in thirty seconds what it would cost. If it is wrong for you, you have lost nothing.
It filters honestly in both directions. People who arrive on a call have already seen the price and decided it is worth discussing. Those are better conversations for everybody.
It is consistent with everything else we claim. We tell people what a lead should cost, what we will not do, when not to hire us. Publishing prices is the same instinct. It would be odd to do all that and then hide the number.
The price is the price. We do not have the appetite to remember who we quoted what.
What we do not publish
Two things, for reasons that are about accuracy rather than reluctance.
Your ad spend. Because it is not ours. It goes from your card to Meta or Google, you choose the amount, and it varies by what you are trying to do. We will tell you what we think the floor is for your category on a call, because that genuinely does depend.
Large custom website work. The standard builds are priced. Something unusual needs scoping, and quoting a number without understanding the work would be guessing.
What to ask an agency that will not quote
Three questions that usually get you most of the way.
What is your lowest monthly fee? Not what it costs for your business, just what the floor is. An agency unwilling to say is telling you the price depends on who is asking.
Does my ad spend go through you, and do you take a percentage? This is the biggest hidden cost in agency pricing and it does not depend on anything about your business.
What is included after the first month? Setup is month one. The retainer is paying for something after that and it should be describable.
If the answers are evasive, the pricing probably is too.
The test we apply
Would we be comfortable with a client seeing what another client pays?
Publishing the prices means the answer is always yes, which removes a whole category of awkward. That is worth more to us than the extra margin we could extract from the businesses that look like they could afford it.