Should I put my prices on my website or hide them behind a 'contact sales' form?
The short answer
If you are selling to small teams or self-serve users, publish the price. Hiding it filters out exactly the buyers who wanted to move fast and pay you today. Keep pricing gated only when deals are genuinely custom and large enough that a human conversation earns its cost, and even then publish a starting-from number so people can self-qualify.
Go deeper, your way
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Why we picked it
This is the cleanest breakdown of the real decision: it maps public pricing versus a contact sales gate onto your deal size (ACV) and your buyer, instead of preaching one answer. Use it as a starting point to place your own product on the spectrum, not as a verdict. It is honest about the tradeoff, that transparency pre-qualifies buyers and builds trust, while gating buys negotiation room but adds friction.
The right answer follows your go to market and deal size, not an industry default: small, self-serve deals want public prices, while genuinely custom large deals can gate them.
Even when you gate, showing a starting-at number anchors expectations and cuts the abandonment you get from a bare contact sales form.
Public pricing lets buyers self-qualify on budget before they ever talk to you, so the conversations you do get are with people who can actually afford it.
Why we picked it
A first-person founder account from Buffer's CEO on choosing to put their pricing (and the costs behind it) fully in the open, and why that built trust rather than scaring buyers off. It is the honest counterweight to the fear that showing prices gives too much away. Read it as one company's reasoning, a starting point for your own call, not proof that radical openness fits everyone.
Making pricing and its cost breakdown public was a deliberate trust move: showing where each dollar of a subscription goes made the price feel fair instead of arbitrary.
Software pricing looks made-up to buyers because extra users cost you almost nothing, so explaining the real economics behind the number does a lot of the selling for you.
Transparency here was a stance the founder chose openly, which is the useful lesson: decide what you are comfortable showing and own it, rather than hiding by default.
