"How much?" is the first question. Answer it with a range.

"How much?" is the first question almost every customer has. It is also the question most service businesses are most careful not to answer.

There are good reasons for that. Every job is different. A blocked drain might be ten minutes or a morning with a camera. You do not want to be held to a number you gave before you saw the problem. And you would rather not hand your rates to the competitor down the road.

But customers do not see those reasons. They see a business that will not tell them anything until they have given up their phone number.

What customers do when there is no price

Usability researchers at Nielsen Norman Group watched business buyers try to research suppliers. When prices were missing, people got frustrated and went to a competitor's site. The first few sites that gave enough information, including prices, were the ones that made the shortlist. Hidden prices also made the whole company look less trustworthy: "if they hide this, what else are they hiding?"

Home services look the same. In a survey by The ACHR NEWS, 70% of homeowners said they were more likely to call an HVAC contractor who is transparent about pricing.

So the question is not whether to talk about price. It is how to do it without promising something you cannot keep.

The same question is now being asked by AI assistants

There is a newer reason to have an answer ready. In 2025 Google started letting people tap a button in Search and have an AI phone local businesses to ask about price and availability, then send them a summary. It started with categories like auto repair, salons, pest control, plumbing and vets.

Call-tracking company Invoca looked at these calls between July and November 2025. Of the calls that someone (or something) actually answered, 49% on average did not get a price. It was most common in plumbing and pest control, where the answer was some version of "we don't do estimates over the phone."

That is a reasonable policy for a person. But the summary that lands on the customer's phone now reads: Business A: $120–$180. Business B: would not give a price. Guess which one gets the call.

The answer: a range, not a quote

A price range is the honest middle ground. It tells the customer whether you are in their budget, and it leaves you room for the details you cannot know yet.

Compare:

"Please call us to discuss your requirements."

"A leaking mixer tap is usually a leak repair: $90–$200, including the first hour on site. We confirm the price when we see it."

The second one answers the question, sets expectations and still protects you. It also pre-qualifies: someone with $40 in mind will not book, and that is fine.

How to build ranges you can stand behind

1. List your ten most common jobs. For most trades, a handful of jobs make up most enquiries: call-out and first hour, a leak repair, a boiler service, a socket replacement.
2. Give each one a low and a high. The low is the straightforward version; the high is the version with the usual complication. Use what you actually charged on the last few.
3. Say what the price is per. Per job, per hour, per room, per square meter, per guest. "Per room" turns a cleaning quote into simple arithmetic.
4. Add the extras people ask about. Same-day surcharge, oven cleaning, stairs without a lift. These are where surprises (and disputes) come from.
5. Decide what you will never price remotely. Bodywork from a blurry photo, a whole-garden redesign, a legal matter. For those, offer a paid visit or a free survey instead of a number.
6. Write the sentence that protects you. "We confirm the price when we see it" is enough for most customers.

Never let anyone else make up your prices

The worst version of "show prices" is a chatbot that invents them. A general AI model will happily tell a customer that a brake job costs $199 because it read that somewhere on the internet. That is a promise you did not make.

That is why OnDot's Builder bot works the other way around. It never writes a price of its own. It reads the request, picks matching items from your price list, and the arithmetic is done in code. If the model writes an amount in its reply, it is replaced with the one from your list. When nothing on your list fits, it offers your inspection or call-out instead of guessing. And every draft waits for your approval before it is sent.

Our kits come with starter price lists for each trade, clearly marked as examples, so you can start by correcting numbers instead of staring at a blank page.