I happened to be over at Newfangled Web Factory’s site (cool name, by the way) for a reason that now escapes me, and I noticed that they had a whole page devoted to their pricing.
Normally, this is something that web design firms shy away from – for fear of frightening off potential clients, I suppose – and so Kudos to Newfangled for being so upfront.
As a regular customer of the services and products of other design and development firms, it is very frustrating when you are looking at using a potential product or service, but have no idea whether it falls within your budget.
Jacob Nielsen brought this issue to light in his Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002, and yet, three years later it is still an issue as far as I can tell from my travels around the web.
When you go to the Newfangled pricing page it is easy to get a sense of what price range you are looking at for your particular project, based on their description of the services offered for that price range and the examples provided.
I’m sure this approach helps them save time in the client development process by weeding out potential clients who can’t afford their services.
Now, of course, it may not be possible to present your pricing structure in such detail as you haven’t got it worked out to quite that degree. However, even if you say something like “I don’t get out of bed for less than $2k”, this at least gives your potential customer a sense of whether they should bother following up with you or not.
Sidenote: the styling of their example calendar of events page is really nice and is well worth stealing learning from!