Pricing page copy

What pricing page copy is

Pricing page copy is the writing that puts what you charge in front of a buyer before they contact you: the numbers or the bands, what each one includes, what pushes a job to the top of a band, and what is not covered at all. It is the page that decides whether a stranger phones you or phones somebody else.

It is not a price list. A price list is a table for people who have already chosen you. A pricing page is written for someone who has not, and it has to carry the reasoning around the numbers as well as the numbers themselves. It is also not a proposal, which is written for one buyer after a conversation has already happened.

When you need one

You need one when you are spending hours quoting work you were never going to win. Every enquiry that arrives, discovers the price and vanishes cost you a call, an email and a quote. A published number removes most of those before they reach you.

That is the real argument for publishing. It does not cost you good deals. It costs you the deals you did not want, and it costs you the awkward conversation where a buyer with a quarter of the budget finds out on a call. Buyers who can afford you are not put off by the number; they are put off by having to ask for it.

You do not need one if every job genuinely is a different shape and you sell three of them a year. A handful of large bespoke projects is better served by a reusable proposal than by a page of caveats. For everybody else, the honest position is that "it depends" is a description of the inputs, not a reason to stay silent about the range.

What goes in it

The page has to answer the number and everything the number sets off.

• The bands. Three or four ranges rather than one figure, each with the kind of buyer it fits. A band is not a hedge if you say what moves a job from one to the next.
• Worked shapes. Two or three short descriptions of real jobs and what they came to: the size, the inputs, the number. This is what makes a band usable by someone doing sums.
• What is included, in full. Revisions, travel, materials, meetings, the year of support. Anything you charge for later has to appear here, or the page has bought you an argument.
• What is excluded. Named plainly. Exclusions are the most-read part of a pricing page and the most-skipped part of writing one.
• How and when you are paid. Deposit, stages, terms, and what happens if a job stops halfway.
• The questions the number prompts. Why it is more than the cheap option, what the cheap option leaves out, whether it can be phased. Answered where they arise.

This site does what it recommends. The four ways of working here, with their numbers, are published on the pricing page, and I would not ask a client to do something I avoid myself.

What you get

The page copy. The bands, the worked shapes, inclusions and exclusions, payment terms and the questions section, written out with headings, the title tag and the meta description.

A band note. What moves a job between bands, written down, so whoever quotes next year quotes the way the page promises.

The lines that go elsewhere. The same numbers, phrased for a service page, an email reply and a quote, so a buyer never sees two different answers.

A wording for the things you will not publish. Most businesses have one price they cannot put on a page. You get a sentence that says so honestly rather than one that looks like concealment.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A small commercial photography studio in Halifax takes about twenty enquiries a month and converts three. The website says "contact us for a quote". The owner spends most of a working day each week quoting for people who wanted a single cheap headshot.

The new page publishes three bands in CAD with the kind of job in each: a half-day on location, a full day with two setups, and a multi-day product shoot with retouching. Three worked shapes follow, each naming the number of finished images, the licence granted and the turnaround. Exclusions are listed: travel beyond the province, models, studio hire, rush delivery. A short section explains why a licence for a national campaign costs more than the same shoot for a local one, because that is the question every buyer asks second. Enquiries fall to about eight a month. Conversions stay at three, and the owner gets the day back.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What you charge now, what you actually charged on your last ten jobs, and which enquiries you would rather not receive. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Scope, price and dates agreed before anything starts.
3. The numbers. Two to four working days going through past quotes and invoices with you to find the bands that are already true. Most businesses discover their real pricing here rather than inventing it.
4. Your decision on what is published. You see the proposed bands and exclusions and approve them before a page is written. Nothing appears that you have not signed off.
5. The draft and one round of changes.
6. Final copy, band note and the lines for elsewhere. Delivered together.

One to two weeks from first call to final copy is typical, and longer if past invoices have to be pulled together before the bands can be seen.

What it costs

Pricing page copy is quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call. What moves it is how much of your own pricing history has to be untangled first, how many bands or service lines the page covers, and whether the same numbers then have to be carried across the rest of the site. The figure is fixed in writing before anything begins. The four ways of working here are published, and what content marketing costs in the vault goes through the shapes in more detail.

What happens next

Three things usually follow. The questions the page raises get their own room on an FAQ page. A buyer who now has the number goes looking for who else they could pay it to, which is what a page naming the alternative is for. And where the price truly is bespoke, the document that follows the call gets written so it stops being rebuilt every time. None of it is assumed. The pricing page is finished work on its own.