Agencies should publish prices: a third already do, so the excuses are gone
Ask a tradesperson what a boiler swap costs and you will get a number, or at least a range. Ask most marketing agencies what their service costs and you will get a discovery call. Around a third of the UK trades agencies we track now publish prices. That is enough to prove it can be done, which means the other two thirds are choosing not to.
The evidence that it is possible
The usual defence of hidden pricing is that every client is different. The agencies that publish prices have not found this a problem. Websites 4 Trades charges £30 a month. Trustmark Trades charges £299 plus VAT. Leads 4 Local publishes tiers at £349, £599 and £999. Roofing SEO Services publishes packages from £499 to £2,599 depending on local competition, which is how you handle the 'it depends' objection: you say what it depends on and give the range.
At the other end, Nivoro Marketing publishes retainers of £8,000, £13,500 and £25,000 a month plus VAT for glazing firms turning over £10m to £50m. Tea Powered Projects publishes £4,500 up front plus a platform plan from £95 to £1,000 a month. Market Maestro publishes LinkedIn outreach from £850 a month. These are not cheap, commoditised services. They are expensive and bespoke, and their providers still managed to write a number down.
Our ranking of trades agencies that publish prices runs through the full list. The range is £30 to £25,000 a month. If prices can be published across a range that wide, they can be published.
Why the rest do not
The honest reason is that a hidden price lets the agency quote what it thinks the client will bear. A roofer with a new van and a confident manner gets one figure; a sole trader with a tired website gets another. Agencies call this tailoring. Tradespeople, who are regularly accused of doing the same thing with a quote, call it something else.
The second reason is the sales process. A discovery call is a sales call, and an agency that gets you onto one has a far better chance of signing you than a pricing page does. JDR Group offers a free consultation and links to pricing guides without figures on the page. Lead Wave quotes via WhatsApp. SanXpert Digital says fixed monthly fee, no percentage of ad spend, rolling monthly, and then stops short of the number. Each of these firms may be excellent. Each has decided you should talk to them before you know what they cost.
The third reason is fear of comparison. If your fee is £600 a month and the agency down the road publishes £299, you would rather the tradesperson did not see the two side by side before hearing why yours is worth more. That is understandable. It is also exactly the comparison the tradesperson is entitled to make.
What hidden pricing costs the tradesperson
Time, first. A tradesperson shortlisting five agencies without published prices has to have five calls to learn five numbers, then discover that three are out of budget. That is a day of work lost to information that should have taken five minutes.
Then negotiating position. Once you have spent forty minutes on a call explaining your business, you are invested, and the number lands on a softer surface than it would on a web page. Agencies know this. It is why the call comes first.
And finally trust, which is the sector's scarcest resource. We wrote in why tradespeople switch agencies that most of the industry's promises are reactions to past grievances. Hidden pricing is the grievance that has not yet been fixed, because the agencies that benefit from it are the ones who would have to fix it.
The objections, taken seriously
'Ad spend varies, so we cannot give a total.' True, and irrelevant. Publish the management fee and say that ad spend is on top. ServiceLeads does exactly this: £750 a month flat, ad spend paid direct to Meta. Nobody is confused.
'Our work is bespoke.' Then publish a from-price and a typical range, as Get A Trades Website does with tailored sites typically £750 to £3,000 or more. A range is a price.
'Competitors will undercut us.' They will anyway, by asking your clients what they pay. Publishing the price simply means the client finds out from you rather than from your rival.
'Clients would rule us out before hearing our value.' Some would, and they were never going to buy. The ones who remain arrive pre-qualified, which is a word agencies normally like.
The standard we would propose
Not a single number, necessarily. A minimum of three things: a from-price or a range for each service; a clear statement of what is and is not included, especially ad spend; and the contract terms, meaning minimum period, notice and what the client keeps on exit. Roofing SEO Services manages all three on one page. So does Trustmark Trades. It takes a paragraph.
Directories and rankings, including ours, should then treat the absence of a published price as a data point in itself. An agency that will not say what it costs has told you something about how it intends to sell to you. We now flag it on every profile, as readers of our profile of Local Leads Accelerator, which publishes no price, will have noticed.
| Minimum disclosure | Why it matters | Agencies already doing it |
|---|---|---|
| From-price or range per service | Lets a tradesperson rule in or out in minutes | Roofing SEO Services, Get A Trades Website, Leads 4 Local |
| What is included, and whether ad spend is extra | Stops the £750 fee becoming a £2,750 surprise | ServiceLeads, Nivoro Marketing |
| Minimum term, notice, what you keep on exit | Defines the real cost of a wrong choice | Roofing SEO Services, Trustmark Trades |
The direction of travel
The good news is that the proportion publishing is rising, and it is rising from the bottom and the top at once. Cheap, systemised agencies publish because their price is the pitch. Expensive specialists publish because it filters out the wrong clients. The squeezed middle, selling bespoke-ish services at £500 to £1,500 a month, is where the silence persists, and it is the part of the market where a tradesperson most needs to compare.
It will not hold. Once a third of a market publishes, the question changes from 'why do you publish?' to 'why don't you?', and the second question has no good answer. Agencies that get ahead of it will look confident. Those that wait will look as if they had something to hide, which, in the plainest sense, they did.
Frequently asked questions
How many trades marketing agencies publish their prices?
Roughly a third of the thirty UK agencies we track publish a price, a from-price or a range on their websites. The rest require a call or quote.
Why do agencies hide their prices?
Typically to tailor the quote to the client, to move the conversation onto a sales call before price is discussed, and to avoid direct comparison with cheaper competitors.
What should an agency publish at minimum?
A from-price or range per service, a clear statement of what is included and whether ad spend is extra, and the contract terms including what the client keeps if they leave.