It is eleven o'clock on a Tuesday night. Someone has finally sat down, picked up their phone, and decided that this is the week they get the garden done, the boiler looked at, or their hair sorted before the wedding. They search. They find you. And the page says: DM for prices.
Some of them will message you. Many will not. Messaging a stranger to ask how much something costs feels like walking into a shop and having to ask for every price tag. Plenty of people would rather walk out and try the shop next door, and online the shop next door is one tap away.
Why owners write it
I understand why the words are there. Prices vary. A full groom on a Labrador is not a full groom on a dachshund. A boiler service is one thing, a leak behind a bath is another. Owners worry that a number on a page becomes a promise, and that a competitor will read it. So the price goes behind a message, where it can be explained.
The trouble is that the explanation never happens, because the message never comes. You cannot explain a price to someone who has already left.
What to write instead
You do not need one price. You need an honest shape of a price, written the way you would say it across the counter.
- A starting point with the thing it includes. "Full groom from £38, small dogs up to 10kg." That is a from-price that means something, because it says what the from is for.
- A range for the jobs that vary. "Most boiler services are £85 to £110. Older boilers take longer." People are fine with a range. What they cannot cope with is nothing.
- The two or three things people ask for most, with the number next to each. Not the whole price list. The ones that get asked at the counter every day.
- The rule for everything else. "Anything bigger, we quote in writing before we start." That one line removes the fear on both sides.
If a job genuinely cannot be priced without seeing it, say so, and say what the visit costs. "Call-out £45, taken off the bill if we do the work" is a price. It is a far better price than silence.
Who this is about
The UK Business Data Survey for 2026 found that about three in four sole traders now have a website, and five in six businesses with up to nine staff. That still leaves a lot of good businesses with a Facebook page, a phone number and nothing that answers the question at eleven at night. If that is you, this is the first thing to fix, before the photos, before the logo, before anything that looks nice.
The customer who reads your prices at midnight and books at eight in the morning never had to talk to you. That is the point.
A test you can do tonight
Open your phone. Search for what you do and the town you do it in. Tap your own listing, then your own page. Count the taps until you see a number with a pound sign in front of it. If the answer is "there isn't one", you have found the job for this week.
If you want a second pair of eyes, the free website check does exactly that count, along with the other things that lose bookings, and sends you a score and the three biggest fixes within two working days.
Source for the website figures: the UK Business Data Survey 2026, published by the Department for Business and Trade on gov.uk.
Dale, Pagefive