Publish the price, and stop telling people to DM you for details

Someone asks how much. You reply with a friendly paragraph asking what they have in mind. They answer two days later. You send a number. They read it and never write again. Multiply that by the eleven other threads sitting in your messages and you have spent a week of evenings on a conversation that a single line of text could have had for you while you slept.

What hiding the number is actually doing

The usual defence is that a private price lets you read the room. If they seem keen, quote high. If they seem hesitant, come down. In practice the room reads you. You are answering at eleven at night, on a phone, to someone whose budget you cannot see, and the number you produce has more to do with how the day went than with what the work is worth.

The bigger cost is invisible, because it is made of people who never wrote to you at all. Plenty of buyers will not ask. Not because they cannot afford it, but because asking creates an obligation, and they are not ready to be sold to yet. They wanted to check whether this was a 40 thing or a 400 thing and then get on with their evening. With no number on the page, they close the tab and you never learn they existed.

There is one genuinely hard case, and it is worth naming rather than glossing over. If every job you take has a different scope, a single public price is a lie in one direction or the other. That is real. It is also solvable, and the solution is not to go back to hiding.

Two ways of answering the same question

Compare what happens to one curious visitor at eleven at night under each approach. The difference is not politeness. It is how much of the work the page does when you are not there.

Publishing it properly

Putting a number in your bio is not the same as publishing a price. What you want is a page for the thing itself, with a title, a description, and a button that takes money. Work through this once and the whole category of message disappears.

What it looks like in practice

Imagine an illustrator taking character commissions. Previously: a bio saying "commissions open, DM for pricing", around fifteen enquiries a month, most of which end at the number. Instead she publishes three things. A bust at 120, a half-body at 190, and a paid 30-minute call at 40 for anything unusual. The order form asks for references, the deadline, and whether it is for commercial use.

The enquiry count drops. That is the point, and it is worth expecting rather than being alarmed by. The people who do write have already accepted a number and have already answered the three questions she used to ask by hand. The unusual jobs, the ones that used to eat an hour of free scoping, now start with 40 in her account and a call in the calendar. None of this is a promise about volume. It is a change in what your remaining attention is spent on.

The mistake most people make when they finally publish

They publish the price and hide everything else. A bare number with no description and no scope invites exactly the same conversation, only now it starts with "does that include...". The price is only half of a public price; the other half is the boundary. Say how many revisions, how long the call is, what file you send, how quickly you reply. A page that answers the follow-up questions is what actually empties your inbox, and it is also the text that makes the page findable in the first place. If you are moving an existing offer across from somewhere else, the migration guide covers bringing the wording with you.

Publishing a price is not a growth tactic. It is an administrative decision that gives you your evenings back and lets people who were never going to write to you buy from you anyway. You can see how the product page, the order form and the booking flow fit together on the bookings page, and what each plan includes on the pricing page. The link itself is free forever, so the number can go up tonight.