When to show vs hide prices

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📝 Context

Topic: Pricing
For: B2C. Can be tested for B2B 
Research date: September 2025
Universities: Oklahoma State University, Texas A&M University, University of Navarra, Iowa State University, Lingnan University, University of Florida, Esade

You’re launching a new cloud storage service. You charge more than your competitors, but provide faster upload and download times and better security and encryption.

You’re debating whether you should show your pricing tiers or make customers book a discovery call where they find out the prices.

The science says the latter, showing your prices after you’ve pitched your product, might be the best option for you.

P.S.: Want creative ways to increase how much people are willing to pay for your product? Check out these unusual ways to increase willingness to pay, exclusively for paid members.

📈 Recommendation

For premium products and services (e.g. a cashmere blanket or software with best-in-class functionality), delay showing your price to customers (e.g. reveal the price after a form is submitted or after a discovery call). By making the sales cycle longer, you have the opportunity to build and show your value first, leading to increased sales.

For affordable products and services (e.g. instant coffee or toothbrushes), or those at a discounted price, show your price immediately. If customers have to wait to see the price, the final number will seem higher, leading to fewer sales.

🎓 Findings

• When people have to wait to find out a price, they judge the price against their expectations of how expensive or affordable they expected it to be, instead of judging the price on its own. This makes them more likely to buy expensive items and less likely to buy affordable items.

• As part of 6 experiments, people were:

  • 21.1% more likely to buy an expensive espresso machine when they saw the price after adding it to their cart vs when browsing.

  • 18.1% less likely to want to buy a 30% off espresso machine when the sale price was shown after a click, compared to immediately

  • 11.4% less likely to buy from a daily deal email with hidden prices sent by a retailer, because they expected a deal would lead to lower prices than those actually given

• The effect:

  • Weakens when people have mixed beliefs about the price (e.g. some expect a product to be expensive, some expect it to be affordable).

  • Disappears when price is the primary factor people are looking at when deciding to buy.

🧠 Why it works

• When we’re looking at products, we have price expectations (e.g. a box of cereal should cost ~$3-$5) that we judge a product’s price against.

• If we don’t know the price immediately, we rely on these price benchmarks even more. These benchmarks are higher for premium brands and lower for discounted ones.

• As we find out the actual price, we’re surprised, either positively (cheaper than expected) or negatively (more expensive than expected), which drives our decision to buy or not.

• When a product is cheaper than we thought it would be, seeing the price immediately increases the impact of that surprise. In contrast, if it’s more expensive than we thought, delaying the price softens the negative shock.

⭐ What others say about advertising in this space

Placements available for 2026. Learn more here and reach out for your choice of dates if you are interested. We usually receive many requests in January.

P.S.: Should we ‘hide’ our sponsorship prices (as many newsletters do), or keep showing them in our media deck?

Until now, I favored showing them in the name of transparency and efficiency. But that might be the wrong choice according to this new research.

What do you think? You can just reply here. I read every email.

✋ Limitations

• The study looked at relatively short, low-effort delays (e.g. showing the price after a click). The effect may work differently in cases of longer delays (e.g. submit a form and receive an email) or multi-step processes (e.g. book a discovery call, listen to a sales pitch and then find out the price).

• The research focused on people’s expectations of the price for an item. Other factors, like impatience or frustration at not being told the price immediately could also influence decisions to purchase. For example, some customers may choose to leave a website if they can’t find the price quickly.

• The study didn’t look at how competitor pricing may influence the effect. For example, if other competitors show prices, people may be less willing to wait to find out a price. Hiding prices may lead other competitors to change their prices as well.

• People’s own knowledge and confidence in prices might influence how people respond to missing price information. For example, a professional photographer would likely respond differently when a hidden price for a high-end DSLR camera is revealed compared to someone buying a camera for the first time.

👀 Real-life example

Retool is a premium-priced software for building low-code internal apps for businesses. They immediately reveal prices on their website.

❌ Issue: Competitor platforms offer better pricing for similar user and workflow limits, which may lead customers to leave before finding out how Retool’s functionality compares.

✅ Solution: Retool can optimize their pricing page by:

• Removing their prices from the page and only sharing them after potential customers book a discovery call.

• Making their value proposition compared to their competitors clearer (e.g. “The easiest platform for non-technical teams to build internal apps”).

• Describing the top 3 benefits of each price tier instead of vague descriptions like “For teams who need more control”.

• Adding a new pricing tier at $40 per standard user, with slightly less features than their Business plan. A tier priced at 80% of the premium package with slightly fewer features can increase sales of the premium, Business package.

• Reading our Science-based Playbook of SaaS Optimization for more than 60 recommendations for improving SaaS conversions and revenue.

🔍 Study type

Online experiments and field experiment (802,831 people receiving Daily Deal emails at Argentine electronics retailer Fravega).

📖 Research

Concealing Prices: How Delayed Price Disclosure Influences Consumer Purchase Decisions. Journal of Consumer Research (September 2025)

🏫 Researchers

• Felipe M. Affonso. Oklahoma State University

• Amin Shiri. Texas A&M University

• Diego Aparicio. IESE Business School, University of Navarra

• Minzhe Xu. Iowa State University

• Xiang Wang. Lingnan University

• Chris Janiszewski. University of Florida

• Marco Bertini. Esade, Universitat Ramon Llull

Remember: This is a new scientific discovery. In the future it will probably be better understood and could even be proven wrong (that’s how science works). It may also not be generalizable to your situation. If it’s a risky change, always test it on a small scale before rolling it out widely.

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🎓 It took me, a PhD analyst, and a marketing pro 12.5 hours to accurately turn this 22-page research paper into this 3min insight. 

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