Should I Put Prices on My Website?

Ask a room of salon owners, barbers, and café owners whether prices belong on a website and you will start an argument. One side says publishing prices invites bargain hunters and gives competitors a free look. The other side points out a simple fact: price is the first question nearly every customer has, and a website that refuses to answer it sends that customer to whoever will. Both concerns are real. But only one side of this argument is getting more expensive every year.

What customers actually do when there is no price

Picture the customer, because it is probably you in your own life. You are choosing between two barbershops. One site lists cuts and prices. The other says “call for pricing.” Calling means stopping what you are doing, hoping someone answers, and having a conversation just to learn one number. Most people do not call. They book the shop that answered. A “contact us for a quote” form is not a neutral choice — it is a filter that quietly removes every customer who wanted the number first, which is most of them.

What the research found

This is not just a feeling. The team at Ranktracker counted pricing pages across 171 companies in 2026 and found a stark split: software products publish a starting price 74 to 81 percent of the time, while only 17 percent of the service companies they counted publish any price at all — the rest send you to a form. In other words, service businesses hide their prices far more than almost anyone else selling online. For a local salon, barbershop, or café, that gap is an opening: the business that publishes is answering a question almost every competitor refuses to.

The 2026 reason: AI assistants filter on price

There is a newer cost, and it is the one that changed our advice from “consider it” to “do it.” More customers now ask an AI assistant — ChatGPT, Google's AI answers, and the like — to recommend a business, and then they add a budget: “a salon in Kennewick under $80,” “a barber under $40.” As Ranktracker's study explains, the assistant can only compare businesses whose prices it can read. A business with a published number gets compared. A business with a form gets dropped from the answer silently — no click, no visit, nothing in your analytics to tell you it happened. You were not outranked. You were not eligible for the question.

What to publish, business by business

The “starts at” compromise

If your pricing genuinely varies — color services by hair length, catering by headcount — you do not have to choose between a full rate card and nothing. Publish a starting figure with the unit and the reason it moves: the service name, “from,” your real starting price, and one short line about what raises it. Ranktracker's research calls this one of the strongest options short of a full list, because a buyer can do arithmetic with it — and so can an assistant building a shortlist. Two practical rules from the same research: put the figure in the text of the page, not only inside an image, and put a date near it so readers know it is current.

The honest worries, answered

“My competitors will see my prices.” They already can — one phone call or one walk-in tells them. Your customers, meanwhile, cannot see them at all right now. You are hiding your prices from the wrong people. “My prices change.” Then date the page and update it when they change; on a care plan, that is a small content update, not a project. “My work is custom.” Price the repeatable 80 percent — the standard cut, the standard service, the menu — and say plainly that custom work is quoted. That is honest, and it is more than most of your competitors publish.

We practice this ourselves. Our website pricing is published in full — $300 setup and a $99/month care plan — in our Kennewick website cost guide, where anyone, including our competitors, can read it. It has never cost us a client we wanted. It regularly starts conversations with owners who tell us the published price is why they called us first.