Should You Put Prices on Your Website? Yes.

Spring 2020, I'm at a card table in my garage. Two-year-old Hank is climbing my leg. The phone's ringing because there's a pandemic and every toilet in Northeast Ohio is suddenly the most important thing in the world. My dad's in the hospital — knee replacement that turned into six weeks of complications. And I'm quoting jobs cold. No floor, no ceiling, no documentation, no Mike. Just guessing out loud to strangers and hoping it landed somewhere reasonable.

That's what hiding your prices actually costs. When the one person who knows them isn't there, you have nothing.

Why Most Shops Hide Their Prices

I get the fear. I lived it for years.

You don't post prices because a competitor will see them and bid under. Because a customer will see the number before they see you, panic, and hang up. Because every job is different and any number you post becomes a lie or a trap. I'm not gonna tell you those are stupid concerns.

But they're all the same thing — flinching.

The shops that won't put a number online are usually the same shops that won't charge what the job actually costs when they're standing in the customer's kitchen. I was one of them. I'd quote a job at $4,200 that I knew was an $8,000 job because I was scared of the number. Scared she'd call someone else. Scared I'd be the expensive one.

That's not pricing. That's being scared and calling it strategy.

My dad Mike ran this shop for 36 years on personality and a Rolodex. He never wrote a price down anywhere that mattered. Every number lived in his head — the neighborhoods, the pipe eras, the regulars, what each job was worth going back to 1984. That worked fine as long as Mike was answering Mike's phone. When it stopped, I had nothing. No anchor. Customers can feel when you're guessing. Some of them said thank you and called around. A couple ended up at shops that had ranges posted and got an answer in thirty seconds without a phone call at all.

That's what the flinch costs.

What "Posting Prices" Actually Means

You're not publishing a fixed menu — price per fitting, line items, all that. This isn't a restaurant.

What you're doing is giving the customer an honest ballpark and explaining what moves the number.

For Whittaker, a drain snake starts at $89. It can go to $6,800 if the camera goes in and finds collapsed clay 60 feet out under a side yard with a 90-year-old oak on top of it. That range is real. It's also completely explainable. What pushes you from $89 to $6,800 is pipe material, depth, whether we hand-dig or machine, permit and inspection costs, and whether the homeowner will let us within ten feet of the tree. Write that on a page. Plain English. The customer who reads it before calling already understands why you're not the same as the $49 drain special they saw on a door hanger.

One thing I'll say directly: Cleveland prices are not Columbus prices. They're sure as hell not Dallas prices. Most of the pricing advice online is written by guys in markets where the labor math, the material costs, and the sewer infrastructure are all different. Any number you post has to be yours — your labor rate, your truck cost, your overhead, your market. Don't pull numbers off a Phoenix plumbing blog and drop them on your site. You'll either underbid yourself into trouble or post numbers that make no sense for Parma in January.

Know your numbers first. Then post.

What Actually Happens When You Put Numbers on the Site

Most shops assume posting prices kills calls. Customer sees a number, panics, calls the cheapest guy.

Here's what I saw at my own shop.

Becca works the office two days a week. The other three days, Danielle handles calls. When we put ranges on the site in 2021, the calls that came in were different. Customers had already seen the water heater range. They'd already decided they could afford it. The call wasn't a price conversation anymore — it was a scheduling conversation. Shorter calls. More of them booked. Fewer people calling to window-shop.

Becca's two days a week have done more for this shop's revenue than the fifth truck did. A good person answering the phone matters. Pricing on the website means that person isn't starting every call from zero.

The customers who shop purely on lowest price — they're the home warranty customers of the direct market. Sixty cents on the dollar, 90 days to pay, a fight on every ticket. I dropped the home warranty work in 2022. Revenue that year dropped some. Net went up. Before Danielle picks up the phone, the pricing page has already filtered out most of those calls. That's not nothing.

The Part I'm Still a Little Embarrassed About

Those eight weeks in March and April 2020 remade how I run this shop.

I inherited a business built entirely on information that lived in one person's head. When that person was unavailable, I was making up numbers at nine at night while a customer waited on hold because they'd called back about a quote I'd left three days earlier. Some of those jobs didn't book. Some of them went somewhere else. I don't know for certain that price was the reason — but I was slow and uncertain and some other shop was neither.

Here's what bothers me. I knew this problem had a solution. I'd seen it at Crestwood Plumbing from 2012 to 2018. Thirty trucks. They had documented pricing tiers, and the tech handed a printed rate sheet to the customer before the conversation even started. I watched customers say yes at Crestwood faster and cleaner than they ever did at Whittaker. The number was already out there. Nobody was negotiating — they were scheduling.

I knew it worked in 2012. I didn't do it at my own shop until 2021. That's embarrassing.

Shops That Shouldn't Post Prices Yet

Not everyone should run home and put a pricing page up this week.

If you don't know your own numbers, posting is worse than posting nothing. You'll underbid yourself for six months or you'll post a "starting at" that turns into something else on every complicated call, and then you're explaining the gap while standing in someone's kitchen.

I took over this shop on a handshake from my dad. No written buyout, no operating agreement, no documented valuation. I love Mike. That handshake was a mistake — not because he isn't a man of his word, but because a handshake doesn't hold up the first time there's a real disagreement about what the number meant. A price you haven't actually calculated fails the same way. You post it in good faith, and the first job that runs complicated turns it into a problem.

Know your labor rate. Know what the truck costs per day. Know your overhead. Then post.

The other category: shops that skip permits to keep the price down. Those shops can't post prices because their prices only work if the customer doesn't know what's been left out — the permit, the inspection, the re-inspection. That's in my price. That's why my price is what it is. If your number only works when the customer can't see what it doesn't include, that's not a website problem.

What to Do With This

Name your three most common calls. For Whittaker, that's a drain snake, a water heater swap, and a sewer scope. Write down the low and the high from your last five invoices for each one. That's your range — your actual jobs, your actual market, not a number you copied from somewhere.

Then write two or three sentences for each one explaining what pushes the price up. Drain snakes: access, whether the camera needs to go in, what we find once it does. That's it. You're not writing a manual. You're answering the question the customer was going to ask on the phone before they have a chance to ask it.

Put the page where it can be found. Tell whoever's answering your phone that it exists. When a customer calls and says "I saw on your site that a water heater swap starts around $850, is that right?" — the answer is yes, here's what that covers, when works for you. Not a pause. Not a callback.

One more thing. In a neighborhood like Parma, Nextdoor moves more work than Google, and Google moves more than Yelp. But none of it closes if the customer who found you on Nextdoor clicks over to your site and finds nothing about price and calls the next guy who does. Your reputation gets them to the site. What's on the site gets them to the phone. Those two things have to work together or you're doing half the job.

FAQ

If I post prices, won't my competitors just undercut me?

They might. But if a competitor sees your range and prices under it to steal calls, they're either losing money on those jobs or cutting corners somewhere. Neither one is a shop you need to lose sleep over. The customer who picks the guy $20 cheaper on a $250 call was never going to be loyal anyway.

What if my jobs are too variable to put a number on?

Every plumbing job is variable. That's not a reason to post nothing — it's a reason to post a range and explain what drives it. A drain snake that turns into a camera job that turns into a spot repair is a real scenario. Put the scenario on the page. Customers understand variable costs. What they don't understand is why you won't give them any information at all.

Should I post exact prices or ranges?

Ranges, with context. An exact price implies a fixed scope, and residential service almost never has a fixed scope until you're standing in front of the problem. A range with a clear explanation of what moves the number is accurate and it anchors the customer before the call — which makes that call shorter for whoever's picking up.

What if my prices are higher than what customers expect?

Good. Better they know before they call than after you've driven to the house. The customer who reads your range, decides it's too much, and calls someone else has saved you both an hour. The customer who books and then argues the invoice after the install — that one costs you. Sticker shock on the website is cheap.

Will posting prices hurt me with customers who want to negotiate?

In my experience, the customers who want to negotiate residential service work are the hardest customers in every other way too. Slow to decide, three calls before the appointment, hovering the tech, creative Yelp reviews. If posting a price discourages them from calling, that's a fine outcome. Your time is real. Price it like it is.

I only do commercial work — does any of this apply to me?

Partially. Commercial work is more relationship-driven and most bids go through a formal process, so a public pricing page matters less there. But even on pure commercial, having documented rate sheets — your T&M rate, your after-hours rate, your emergency call rate — that you can hand to a facilities manager without being asked is the same idea. Don't make people ask for information you could have given them already.

Should You Put Prices on Your Website? Yes. Here's Why.