Operating Record

We Put Our Prices on the Website. It Closed $342K.

Ask a room of contractors about publishing prices and you’ll get the same three objections every time: competitors will undercut us, customers will price-shop us, and every job is different anyway. All three feel true. We put pricing calculators on the website regardless — part of a deliberate bet that answering the question homeowners actually have beats hiding from it.

Year one as a tracked source: three demos and zero attributed revenue. Year two: $342,068, closing at 51%.

Read the close rate against the right benchmark

A 51% close looks merely average until you ask what it’s being averaged against. The company’s 55.1% blended rate that year was carried by repeat customers closing at 74% and self-generated leads closing north of 95% — people who already knew and trusted the company. Calculator leads are web strangers. Strangers who priced their own job on a screen converted within four points of a blend stacked with the warmest demos in the building. Cold sources in the same book — aggregator leads, organic search — ran in the 30s and low 40s.

The mechanism is self-qualification. A homeowner who has already seen the number shows up to the demo pre-sold or doesn’t show up at all — and either outcome is cheaper than the alternative, which is a full presentation that dies at the sticker. The calculator doesn’t just generate leads. It quietly disposes of the ones that were never going to buy, before they cost a rep an evening.

The price isn’t a secret. Your competitors already know it, and your customers will learn it eventually. The only question is whether they learn it from you, before the demo, or at the kitchen table, after one.

The three fears, audited

“Competitors will see our pricing.” They could already get it with one phone call pretending to be a homeowner. Publishing cost us nothing we were actually keeping. “Customers will price-shop.” The ones who shop on price alone were going to do that anyway — the calculator just spared us the demo. The ones who value the work used the number as proof we have nothing to hide, which is its own differentiator in a trade famous for quote games. “Every job is different.” True, and the calculator says so — it produces a range and an education, not a contract. Ranges turn out to be enough: a homeowner who knows whether their job is a $9K or a $19K conversation arrives able to have it.

The honest footnote

Full ledger, as always: the first four months of 2026 have logged only three calculator demos with no attributed revenue yet — either winter seasonality for a tool tied to project planning, or an attribution gap we’re actively chasing. We publish that line too, because a source you only report in its good quarters isn’t a source, it’s a brochure. The 2025 result stands on its own: a third of a million dollars from answering the one question every contractor website refuses to answer.

The fear was that transparency would cost us. The ledger says hiding the price was the expensive part.