Go look at ten boutique consultancies. Count how many put a number anywhere on the site. The answer is usually zero, and the industry logic is well-rehearsed: every engagement is unique, a number anchors the negotiation, pricing is a conversation.
We publish ours — a Diagnostic Sprint runs a fixed ₹75K–1.5L, AI integration sprints start at ₹8L, product builds at ₹25L. Here is the actual reasoning, including the part that costs us.
Hidden pricing outsources qualification to a sales call
When the site has no number, every mismatched prospect finds out on a call — after they've spent a week deciding to reach out and we've spent an hour preparing. A published band does that filtering silently, at midnight, while the prospect is still comparing tabs. The enquiries that arrive already know the territory. Both sides skip the most awkward meeting in consulting.
A number is a claim about self-knowledge
A firm that can say "integration sprints start at ₹8L" is claiming it knows what a sprint contains, how long it takes, and what usually goes wrong. Vague pricing often correlates with vague scoping. Publishing the band is a forcing function on us: we have to keep engagements standard enough that the number stays true.
What it costs us
Honesty about the trade: we lose the occasional client who would have paid more than the band suggests, and we occasionally get anchored by our own floor. We accept both. The clients we want compare value against a known number; the ones who need the number hidden from them are the engagements that drift.
Where we don't publish
Automations and architecture reviews get a fixed quote on the scoping call instead of a published floor — the honest answer is that their spread is too wide for one number to be true. The rule isn't "publish everything." It's "never make a prospect book a call to learn something a sentence could have told them."