Every price I charge is printed on my website: $4,500 fixed for the Diagnostic, $5,000 to $12,000 monthly for the Growth System, $10,000 and up for the Strategist seat. No ranges hidden behind a call, no discounts under any circumstances, and a refund term I advertise as loudly as the fees. This piece explains the reasoning, because the reasoning is itself the argument for how personal injury firms should read every vendor who prices differently.
Search marketing is what economists call a credence good: the buyer cannot fully evaluate it before purchase, and often not even after. A PI firm owner cannot inspect an SEO engagement the way they would inspect a building. They decide almost entirely on proxies, and they decide as professional skeptics, because most of them have been burned by an agency at least once.
In that environment, price is not just what you pay. Price is information. It is one of the few signals the buyer can actually verify, compare, and reason about before committing. Which means how a vendor prices tells you how they plan to behave, before a single deliverable exists.
Hidden pricing says: the number depends on you, and we will discover together how much you can bear. Movable pricing says: the first number was an opening position. Percentage-of-spend pricing says: our income grows when your costs do. Every one of those structures is a forecast of the relationship.
Printing the numbers does quiet work in every direction, and none of it is generosity.
It ends the negotiation before it starts. Firms that hide prices are planning to negotiate; I am not negotiating, I am diagnosing, and a diagnosis costs what it costs regardless of how the patient feels about the estimate. The meeting can then be about the firm's actual situation instead of a dance about numbers.
It arms the skeptical third party. Every real engagement decision at a law firm survives a hostile review: the partner who was not on the call, the spouse, the lawyer friend who knew someone who got burned. Public prices mean that reviewer finds no daylight between what was pitched and what is printed. Materials that survive cross-examination are the only materials worth producing for buyers who are professional cross-examiners.
It filters honestly. A firm shopping for the cheapest option discovers immediately that I am not it, before either of us spends an hour proving it. The fee floors are the positioning: they state, without adjectives, which end of the market the work serves.
The no-discount rule reads as stubbornness until you translate it. A discount tells the buyer the first price was fiction, and invites the obvious follow-up: what else was? A vendor who folds ten percent under mild pressure has disclosed their conviction, their margins, and how every future disagreement will be resolved.
Lawyers know this from their own fee conversations. The attorney who cuts their fee the moment a client hesitates has taught the client to hesitate. The professionals people actually trust decided their number before the meeting and let the work defend it.
There is also a fairness term the industry rarely says out loud: every discount granted to a hard negotiator is financed by the clients who paid the real number. A no-discount policy is a promise to every existing client that nobody is getting the same work cheaper for shouting.
The Diagnostic is refundable until the roadmap is clear. I advertise that term next to the price because, for a credence good, an outcome commitment reassures the buyer in a way no report ever will.
Nobody controls Google, and any vendor implying otherwise is lying early. So the honest structure moves the risk to the party with the most information: me. If the diagnosis does not produce a roadmap the firm finds clear, the fee comes back. I can offer that plainly, and keep offering it, because the roadmap is always clear; structural problems have nameable causes and sequenced fixes. The term costs me nothing except the obligation to be as good as claimed, which is precisely the obligation a buyer should want priced in.
The same logic runs through the rest of the terms: the retainer is month to month after onboarding, the deliverables are owned outright by the firm, capacity is capped and published. Each surrendered term is one less thing a skeptic has to take on faith.