Most B2B SaaS companies hide pricing because they're afraid of scaring away prospects before they can get them on a demo. They're actually scaring away the wrong prospects and their best buyers.

The standard playbook says hide pricing, force demo requests, and "educate" prospects on value first. The theory is that price without context creates some sort of cognitive dissonance. Without a sales person saying, "but wait let me explain," there is no sale.

The reality?

No price creates assumption and it's always worse than your actual price.

We ran this test at a software company where our entry price was $199 per month. Our largest competitor started at $599 per month. There was a push from leadership to hide pricing even though we were the price leader in our category.

Without pricing on the website, prospects consistently opened demos with "your pricing seems high for our needs." We weren't losing deals to our actual price. We were losing them to an imagined price they'd anchored to our competitor.

In the absence of our pricing, buyers researched the category and found the market leader talked to them. They assumed we cost the same. We inherited a price perception. Sales spent the first ten minutes of every demo resetting expectations downward instead of demonstrating value.

When we displayed pricing clearly, inbound quality changed immediately. Prospects arrived at demos with budget already validated. Conversations started with "how do we get started?" instead of "how much will this cost?" The sales cycle compressed because we weren't spending cycles on prospects who could never afford us—or thought they couldn't.

Here's what matters: fewer demo requests that convert at higher rates beats more demo requests that waste everyone's time. Without pricing, you optimize for volume. With pricing, you optimize for revenue.

The objection is always "but we'll scare people away." Yes. That's the point. Bad-fit prospects who self-select out are doing you a favor. Every unqualified lead your competitor wastes time on is capacity you can use to close actual deals.

This matters most when you're cheaper than the market leader. Your price is a competitive advantage. Hiding it means prospects never discover it until they're already anchored to higher numbers and skeptical of your quality.

There are legitimate cases for complex pricing: true enterprise implementations, genuinely variable pricing based on usage, or when your differentiation requires significant education. But even then, showing a starting point beats showing nothing.

If you can't explain your price on your website, your sales team can't explain it in demos either. The website just forces you to confront weak positioning earlier.

The real test: if you're cheaper than alternatives, show your price immediately. If you're more expensive, show a starting point with "from" language to set floor expectations. If pricing varies significantly, show the framework and typical ranges. At minimum, provide pricing to qualified leads before they schedule demos.

Transparency on pricing always wins. It doesn't scare away good prospects. It scares away bad ones. Every qualified lead your competitors waste on price mismatches is a lead you could close.

Your pricing page isn't a conversion killer. It's a qualification filter. Use it like one.

‍