Should you hide your pricing?

Personally, I leave when I don't see the pricing on a product website. I think I shouldn't have to contact the sales team, for me it's like entering a shop without any price tags on the products.

Had multiple discussions on this in various companies, what I learned is:

• Display pricing for low value, low- or no-touch sales products / SaaS.
• Do no display pricing for very high value and high-touch sales products / SaaS.

For enterprise sales you usually don't want to show pricing since there are too many factors involved in how the final price is calculated. Showing something might be a turn off and you want customers to reach out to you to learn more.

For the simpler SaaS pricing models the prices are often too low to justify the cost of a sales force and in that case you want the customer to simply buy without reaching out to you.

IMO website visitors do not want to talk to your customer reps at all while evaluating. They want a free trial or a free plan with and a detailed info on your plans with pricing.

Onboarding and nurturing are big part of product led growth. Most visitors are not going to onboard without any clue on pricing.

When someone hides their pricing, it kinda tells me indirectly: "This product is more expensive than you think".

The easiest way to make your average session duration less than 5 sec

No, if I don't see pricing, I immediately think 'they are only looking for Enterprise sales'. And even if I'm repping an enterprise, lack of pricing transparency is a red flag. In those cases, I still have to present cost differences between options to others before setting up a demo. Of course enterprise pricing can be fluid, but even showing examples of 'x number of users cost y per user' is helpful. No pricing is a good way to just not even be considered.

Why hide pricing? The only reason (so it would appear) is that you're afraid your pricing will scare people away because it's so high. Or you think that the price is high, but you can convince people it's acceptable if you can get them on a call/Zoom etc. But the offer should be clear in the value. Hiding pricing costs sales - people who balk at the price are balking at the offer. The offer doesn't match up to the value for them.

No. The first thing I do when landing on a SaaS page is search for pricing. The exception being enterprise plans

Generally, I do not like when I don’t see the price as well! But in a few instances I got nice prices out of my “contact us” exercises, in the end, a product is as valuable as it helps you.

I think if my product helps you to save few hundred £’s a month you’d be okay to pay, say £10/month. But if it saves you few thousand then you’d be willing to pay more, right?

Now the real question would be: Why do you hide your pricing?

For my latest project - BotMeNot - I'm not planning to hide the pricing. I intend to put a credit system in place and see how it works.

Personally, this strategy annoys me a lot :D, it is like people sell their products online but ask others to PM for prices which is another unnecessary step and waste of time if the price is not in the budget range.

There are parts of the world that considers it illegal when you don't show or reveal your price to the public.

Besides that, hearing about "pm for price" is super annoying. I might think that the price entirely depend on the buyer, instead of creating a fixed price.

But I do agree with @jansroka, your business can choose to hide the specific product if "there are too many factors involved in how the final price is calculated"

Another solution is to create a separate page entirely for that 'expensive' product, and shows the features and benefits it offers. :)

Great question! I had it both ways in the WBE Space landing page. I did not do any proper experiment but it seems that not having the price increases the clock rate in the "join" button. Not sure if it increases the conversion to paying users...

Pricing is always the first thing we show when we do a demo. We will normally open up our webpage right to the pricing page, and then go into the rest of it. It sets the tone that this is a sales call and we're not a charity or looking for "feedback." But also gives the user a feeling of transparency as well.

I don't think there is any real debate here. If you sell to SMBs, you have to show your pricing. If you sell to Enterprise, you don't. The maximum entry price you can display on your site and still sell your product with a self-serve model is probably around $300/month.

Beyond that, the self-serve model doesn't really work. You need sales reps. The most expensive subscription product I've bought was around $1,500/month. The most expensive I've helped sell was $5,000/month. In both cases, it took tremendous effort and long sales cycles for the sales reps to sell these products.

Below that, you have to show your pricing and let users onboard themselves. You can't have a sales rep talk to every $20/month customer. The math just doesn't add up.

If it is for enterprises then of course it makes a lot of sense. But for others - not so much. It is possible that they might still be in the validation stage in which case it is understandable.

Most probably it would result in lesser conversions than when shown the price, which obviously nobody wants.

I recently moved to a "Contact Us" model since we are now up market and our value to the customer can't be matched by any of our competitors.

Being transparent with prices = less meaningless requests = less time investment. People that don't want to buy won't buy – even if the price is hidden I think...

I used to display pricing right on the landing page, but received a tip a while back about creating a separate "Pricing" page and it has done wonders for me. The pricing is still easily accessible and completely transparent, but I find it reduces friction slightly by pushing them towards trying out the product first since the pricing isn't right in their face.

Why do you want to make life difficult for your prospects? Almost everyone today asks “how much is it?” So you have to address this issue right away. Checking the pricing page of a product or a service is a reflex to me. I want to get the price out of the way, so that I can judge whether I get my money’s worth from the benefits. I don’t wanna wait for a single minute for the sales dept to email me about a $5/m package.

If you’re targeting corporate (I mean blue chip) clients, then it’s acceptable to hide the pricing, since different companies have different needs. Other than that, don’t hide the pricing. Transparency is the standard.

From a customer stand point I would like to see the price of a product right away so I can make a decision.

I see hiding prices mostly in real estate, for potential buyers not to be scared at first glance of the high prices. So brokers usually try to sell you the house through marketing tactics before telling you the price.

You can mimic the same for Saas products but I don't see technical customers fall for this types of tactics.

In my opinion, pricing adds a layer of transparency to the product or service.

I actually purchase products with transparent pricing rather than "Contact us". I followed the same philosophy with my current venture Famewall :)

Being a solo founder, I wouldn't want to spend time getting on a sales call with someone to start using a product.

But I guess Intercom is quite popular with the pricing.

No price, no business. At least not from me.

There are reasons to hide the price - none of which are good, and I rather stay away from businesses like that. The only acceptable exception are high volume enterprise deals.

Hidden SaaS pricing page screams "I want you to be part of my sales funnel" - do you like being in the sales funnel of someone else? why do it to your potential users / customers?

Even in B2B, the user experience is so poor, I've personally lost number of deals because people were disgusted by the lack of transparency. If it's not a highly customisable / variable enterprise solution, there's no reason for it.