Show a price, or at least an honest starting range. Hiding it behind "contact us for a quote" feels safe, and for most small businesses it quietly costs you the leads you actually want, because a serious buyer comparing options leaves the moment they cannot tell whether you are in their budget. The question worth arguing is not whether to show a number, but which one, and how you frame it.
When a page has no price, the visitor fills the gap with a guess, and the guess is rarely kind. Some decide you must be expensive and leave without asking. Others carry on assuming you are cheap and feel misled when the quote finally lands. Both have half-left already, and the competitor who simply printed a number gets the enquiry instead. A visible price does your qualifying for you: the people who can afford you lean in, and the ones who never could stop booking calls that were never going to close.
The usual objection is that competitors will see it. They will, and it matters far less than it feels like it should. A rival can already ring up pretending to be a customer, and the ones worth worrying about know the going rate anyway. You are not keeping the price from your competitors, you are keeping it from buyers, and only the buyers were ever going to pay you. If the entire advantage of your business is a number nobody can see, the number was never the advantage.
If your price is high, showing it is still usually right, you just cannot show it naked. A figure on its own invites sticker shock. The same figure sitting beside what it includes and who it is for reads as a considered price rather than a random one. The client who walks away from an honest number was not going to turn into a happy customer once they discovered it three calls deep. Better they rule themselves out on the first visit, while it costs neither of you anything.
The harder case is genuinely bespoke work, where a single figure would be a lie. You still owe the visitor an anchor. A starting-from figure, or a worked example like "a site like this usually lands in the low thousands", gives a stranger enough to place themselves without pretending every job is identical. "It depends" is true and useless. "It depends, and here is roughly where it tends to land" is true and helpful. All you are trying to do is let someone know within ten seconds whether to keep reading or quietly move on.
There is one real exception. If you sell mostly to large organisations where every deal is negotiated, procurement expects a tailored quote, and a public figure would only anchor you low against contracts worth far more, then keep it off the page and qualify in conversation. That is a deliberate call for a specific market. It is not the same as a local business or a small studio hiding a price because naming it out loud feels frightening. Be honest with yourself about which of those you actually are.
So before you reach for "contact us for pricing", decide what a stranger should be able to work out in their first ten seconds on the page: roughly what you cost, and whether that is meant for someone like them. The harder part, and where most pages come undone, is putting that number on the page so it qualifies the right buyers instead of scaring everyone off, with the context that makes a fair price read as fair. That is a design and copy problem as much as a pricing one, and it rewards someone who has watched it work and fail on real pages. Make the number visible first. Make it land well next.