The short version: write down your three most-asked jobs. Give an honest range for each and the two or three things that move a job up or down it. Name the cheap tier you don’t do, and why. Put it on your website, link it from your profile, re-check it quarterly. That’s the whole move — and it changes who calls you and what they ask.
“Call for a quote” feels safe. Every job’s different, you don’t want to be held to a number, and you’d rather explain in person. All reasonable. Here’s what it looks like from the other side.
The buyer has a problem and money and genuinely wants to hand it to a professional. They search the cost — everyone searches the cost; it’s the most-asked question in every trade — and your site offers them a phone call instead of an answer. Think about the restaurant menu that says market price next to the steak: nobody reads that and feels reassured. They feel the prickle of “I’m about to be ripped off.” They know you know the answer. Withholding it doesn’t read as “every job is different.” It reads as the price depends on what they think I can pay.
So they keep scrolling — and somewhere out there is a competitor who answers the question like a teacher. That’s who gets the call, and by the time they make it, the buyer half-trusts them already. Not because they’re cheaper. Because they went first.
Ranges, not prices — the honest middle ground
Publishing prices doesn’t mean a fixed-price menu for work you haven’t seen. It means answering the question the way you’d answer a mate: “most jobs like yours land between this and this, and here’s what decides where in that range you’d sit.”
The structure, per job:
- Pick your three most-asked jobs. Not your whole service list — the three you get phoned about every week. They’re the three the market is googling.
- Give the honest range. The real one, including where it genuinely starts and ends. A range that starts at a fantasy number to look attractive is “call for a quote” with extra steps — buyers notice when the quote lands nowhere near the page.
- Name what moves the price. Two or three movers per job: size, access, the condition of what’s underneath, compliance, materials. This is the teaching part, and it’s what separates a range from a guess — the buyer learns why prices differ, which is exactly the knowledge that protects them from the cowboy and prepares them for your quote.
That last point is worth saying plainly: a published range isn’t a quote, and saying so on the page is honest, not weaselly. “Every job gets a written quote after I’ve seen it — this is so you’re not flying blind before that.”
Name the cheap tier you don’t do
This is the line almost nobody writes, and it’s the one that makes everything else on the page believable.
Every trade has a bottom tier — no prep, no paperwork, no insurance, no certificate, cash and gone. The buyer comparing your range to a number half its size doesn’t know that tier exists, or what’s missing from it. Until you tell them, the gap between the prices is just a gap, and the cheaper number wins gaps.
So tell them, respectfully and specifically: “You’ll find this job advertised cheaper. That price usually means no surface prep, no compliance certificate, and no insurance behind the work — I don’t operate in that tier, and here’s what it tends to cost owners a couple of years on.” One paragraph. It reframes your range from “the expensive option” to “the done-properly option,” and it does it without naming or bagging anyone.
Anchored next to the tier you don’t do, your honest range stops being the number to beat and starts being the standard to meet.
Where it goes, and keeping it honest
On your own website — a cost page, one section per job: range, movers, the tier you don’t do, what happens next. Infrastructure you own, working on every future buyer.
Linked from your Google Business Profile — for most tradies the profile gets checked first; the cost page is the strongest link you can hang off it.
Sent with new enquiries — “here’s how my pricing works” in the first reply does half the quote visit’s work before you arrive.
Re-checked every quarter. Materials move, your rates move. A calendar reminder, four times a year, ten minutes. A stale range that your quotes consistently overshoot quietly becomes a trust leak — the opposite of the page’s whole job.
And once the page works on paper, say it on camera: the Cost Video is this exact page, spoken by you, and it travels to the decision-maker who never visits your website at all. Page first, video second — the page makes you findable, the video makes you believed.
What the page changes isn’t just who finds you — it’s what the first conversation is. The buyer who’s read your ranges doesn’t open with “how much,” because they already know roughly. They open with “when can you come.” The ones who only wanted the bottom tier filtered themselves out before costing you a site visit. Fewer tyre-kickers isn’t a side effect of published prices; it’s the point. (And when the quote itself goes out, the seven swaps make sure it defends the number the page promised.)
In the Tradie Trust Pack this is card 12 — the card is the move, this guide is the method. Five steps on the dash; the why lives here.
The deeper build — working out your real ranges and turning them into the cost answer buyers find first — is what the Prove It Fast Start walks you through. No gate, no pitch.