The industry default is: no price on the page. You get logos, a tagline, a services grid, sometimes a case study, and then a contact form that opens the door to a discovery call. The number arrives later, over Zoom, after both parties have spent an hour learning whether they even want to be on the call.
I looked at seven Portland web studios recently. Six of them publish nothing. The seventh publishes a minimum ($15,000, on the inquiry form). The rest treat the price as a negotiation you have not yet earned.
This makes some sense from the studio side. A rate on the page anchors the buyer to a number and takes the top off the range. If the buyer has budget for $18,000 and I have posted $12,000, we are now negotiating $12,000. If the number is a black box, we can meet at the buyer's number.
That math works if inbound is thin and every lead is worth extracting max revenue from. It stops working the second inbound is plentiful and the bottleneck is qualification, not price.
What no price on the page actually costs
Every buyer who reads a services page is doing one calculation: could this studio be in my range? If the answer takes a Zoom call to find out, most of them stop reading. They open a new tab and go to the next studio. Not because they cannot afford the studio, but because the friction of finding out is higher than the friction of moving on.
So the studios hiding their numbers select for two kinds of buyer. Buyers with unlimited budget who do not care what a website costs, and buyers who have been referred by somebody who already knows the price. Everybody in the middle — the founder who has $5,000 or $10,000 or $15,000 they are willing to spend but no reference point for whether that is enough — bounces.
The result is that the studio spends most of its intake bandwidth on discovery calls with buyers it will not sell to. Either the budget is wildly off (both directions), or the scope is wrong for the shop, or the buyer already went with somebody else and is comparison-shopping. Every one of those calls burns 30 minutes on both sides.
What a price on the page does
I run two packages. Site is $3,000. Site+ is $4,000. Both prices are on the home page and on the services page. Higher-ticket work exists as a mailto to a different address; nobody comes through the packages funnel for a $25,000 engagement.
Three things happen when the number is on the page. One: the buyers who would never have been in my range self-select out before they contact me. Two: the buyers who are in my range read the rest of the services page with the number in mind, so their inquiry arrives already half-qualified. Three: the wrong-fit buyers who do contact me get a straight referral to somebody more expensive without either of us pretending to negotiate.
The inbound I lose to price-anchoring is real. It is also mostly inbound I would have discarded anyway. The upside of a five-minute intake on a fit lead beats the upside of a 60-minute discovery on a mismatched one, roughly ten to one.
The buyer who fills out the form
The buyer I want to work with is the buyer who read the price, decided it sounded fair for what I ship, and is now ready to hand over the brief. That buyer is not going to argue me down $500. That buyer wants to skip the discovery-call ritual and get the site started.
Every buyer who is not that buyer costs both of us time. The price on the page is how I tell all of them, at once, whether they are the buyer I want.
The studios hiding their numbers are optimizing for the top of the range. I am optimizing for the shape of the inbound. Different math, same industry.