Showing Prices on Your Website Without a Quote Tool

“How do I put prices on my site if every job is different?” So the website ends up showing no number at all. Your Website Is a Brochure. The Homeowner Wanted a Price. makes the case for showing one. This article is the how: three methods you can build this week with your own invoices and a text editor, no software, and the federal advertising rules that decide how each one has to be worded.

Start with last year’s invoices, not with a guess

Every method below starts from the same place: what you actually charged. Pull last year’s invoices for one service and sort them by price. You will see clusters: the small jobs, the ordinary ones and the big ones, with a few oddities at each end.

That pile of paper is also your legal footing. The Federal Trade Commission’s guide for small business says advertising must be truthful and not deceptive, that advertisers must have evidence to back up their claims, and that “the law requires that advertisers have proof before the ad runs.” A price on your website is a claim. Your own invoices are the evidence that it is a real price.

The FTC also judges an ad by what it says outright and by what it implies, from the point of view of the “reasonable consumer,” the typical person looking at it. A price page that is technically true but leaves a homeowner with the wrong idea can still be deceptive. Keep that test in mind as you write.

Method 1: the starting-at line

The simplest version is one sentence per service: what the smallest ordinary job costs, and what it includes. It answers the homeowner’s first question, which is whether you are in their league at all.

The trap is the word “ordinary.” A starting price has to be one you sell at, for a job you describe, and not a number picked to get the phone to ring. The FTC’s Guides Against Bait Advertising (16 CFR Part 238) define bait advertising as “an alluring but insincere offer to sell a product or service which the advertiser in truth does not intend or want to sell,” whose purpose is to switch the buyer to something else, “usually at a higher price.” The guides say advertising includes “any form of public notice however disseminated,” which takes in a website.

Two lines in those guides matter most for a contractor:

• Telling the truth later does not fix it. Section 238.2(b): “Even though the true facts are subsequently made known to the buyer, the law is violated if the first contact or interview is secured by deception.” A starting price that gets you in the door and is then explained away on site is exactly that.
• Talking people out of the advertised job counts against you. Section 238.3 lists running down the advertised product, or refusing to sell it on the advertised terms, among the signs that an offer was not a real one.

So write the starting-at line around a job you are glad to do at that price, and say what it buys. Say a gutter cleaner’s invoices show that one-story homes with up to about 150 feet of gutter rarely run under a certain amount. The honest line names that job: “Gutter cleaning for a one-story home, up to 150 feet of gutter, downspouts flushed: from $[your number].” The example and its numbers are made up; yours come from your invoices.

Method 2: a range table by job size

A starting price tells the homeowner the floor. A table tells them where their own job probably lands, which is the question they actually came with. Build it from the same sorted invoices:

1. Pick the one or two things that move your price most (rooms, square feet, linear feet, stories, the size of the unit).
2. Split your invoices into three or four size bands on that measure.
3. For each band, set aside the strangest few jobs at each end and write down the low and high of what is left.
4. Round the ends to numbers you would say out loud, and write one line under the table on what pushes a job up or down.

Say an interior painter does that with a year of bedroom and living-room jobs. The numbers below are invented for the example; the shape is the point.

Under it, one plain sentence: what is included, and what costs extra (heavy patching, a color change from dark to light, high ceilings, trim and doors). That sentence is not fine print, and it should not read like it. The FTC says that when qualifying information is needed to keep an ad from misleading, it has to be “clear and conspicuous,” and it names “a disclaimer that is easily missed on a website” among the ones that are not likely to work. It also says fine print cannot be used “to contradict other statements in an ad.” Put the conditions next to the numbers, in the same size type.

A range is honest when most of your real jobs of that size land inside it. If your invoices say otherwise, change the table, not the invoices.

Method 3: a worked example for each service

Some work does not split neatly into sizes: a bathroom tile job, a drainage fix, a deck repair. For those, show one typical job, priced the way you would price it, with the parts that change the number spelled out:

• The job: what was done, in the homeowner’s words (“tile a 5 × 8 ft bathroom floor, remove old vinyl, new underlayment”).
• The price: one number or a narrow range.
• What would change it: the three or four things that move the price most, and in which direction.

Call it an example, and make it one you would price that way today. If you present it as a particular customer’s job, it has to be one, at that price. A described job is an implied claim about what you charge, and the FTC looks at implied claims as well as express ones.

“Was” prices, specials and anything “free”

Once prices are on the page, the next temptation is a spring special. The FTC’s small-business guide says the same truthfulness standards apply to “sale” prices and points to the Guides Against Deceptive Pricing, 16 CFR Part 233. Four points from those guides cover nearly everything a contractor would do:

• A “was” price must have been real. Section 233.1 says a former price is a fair basis for a comparison when it is “the actual, bona fide price at which the article was offered to the public on a regular basis for a reasonably substantial period of time.” Its own example is a seller who lists pens at an inflated $10 for a few days, then advertises “Were $10, Now Only $7.50” at his usual price: “obviously a false claim.” If your table showed $650 all year, “was $800” is not available to you.
• “Formerly sold at” means you sold at it. The same section warns against implying that a former price was a selling price, not just an asking price, unless substantial sales were actually made at it.
• A tiny discount is not a sale. When an ad says “Sale” without the old price, section 233.1(e) says the cut must be large enough that the buyer, knowing what it was, would believe a genuine saving was offered; its example is “Reduced to $9.99” from $10.
• “Free” with a purchase means the regular price stays regular. Section 233.4 says that raising the regular price of the thing the buyer must purchase, or attaching other strings, may deceive, and that all the terms of a “free” or “50% off” offer “should be made clear at the outset.” The FTC guide puts it plainly: the price of the purchased product “should not be increased from its regular price.”

Section 233.5 adds the catch-all: do not call an offer “limited” if it is not, and “make certain that the bargain offer is genuine and truthful.”

Keeping the numbers true

A price page is not a one-time job. A table that was honest in March can be wrong by August if lumber, paint or your labor rate moved. A few habits keep it right:

• Date it. “Prices as of October 2026” under each table tells the homeowner how fresh the number is, and reminds you when it is stale.
• Re-sort the invoices every quarter. If more than a few recent jobs of one size fell outside the range, move the range.
• Keep the file. Save the invoice list behind each table. It is the proof the FTC says you need before the ad runs.
• Check your state too. The FTC’s guide notes that every state has its own consumer protection laws for ads that run there, and suggests checking with the state attorney general’s office.

Where the prices go

Put each service’s price on that service’s own page, near the top, not on a separate pricing page three clicks away. The homeowner who lands on your roof-repair page from a search is asking about roof repair. The Website Pages a Contractor Needs (and the Ones Nobody Reads) covers the rest of the page set.

These three methods take an afternoon and cost nothing. Where they run out is the job with five or six variables, where a fixed table would need a hundred rows. That is the point at which a tool that asks the homeowner a few questions and works out a range from your own rules starts to pay; Instant-Quote Software for Contractors: What to Compare Before You Pay is a neutral checklist, and NapkinPrice™ is ours. Either way, the rules above apply to every number it shows.

General information, not legal or tax advice. Rules change and vary by state; check with the agency named above or a professional for your situation.