Nobody Is Going to DM You for Prices

Somewhere in your bio, or your highlights, or the caption of your best-performing post, there is a sentence doing enormous damage: "DM for prices."

You didn't write it out of laziness. You wrote it because someone told you that quoting a number in public cheapens the work, or invites tire-kickers, or lets competitors undercut you. Maybe you wrote it because you genuinely don't have one price, and the honest answer is "it depends." Maybe you wrote it because you wanted the conversation, the chance to explain the value before the number lands.

All of that is reasonable. It is also, in almost every case, costing you money. Not because your prices are too high, but because you've quietly turned "how much is this?" into a task with your name on it, and most people will not do a task to give you money. They'll scroll. They'll check the next account. They'll book the studio that put the number on the page.

Asking is more expensive than you think

Here's what you imagine happens when someone reads "DM for prices": they get curious, they message you, you have a warm conversation, you sell.

Here's what actually happens. A person is on their phone at 11pm, half-interested, comparing three options. To find out what you charge, they have to open a DM, compose a message that doesn't sound presumptuous, hit send, and then wait. That last part is the killer. They now have an open loop with a stranger and no idea whether the answer is $80 or $800. If it turns out to be $800, they've wasted your time and embarrassed themselves a little. So they close the app.

The cost of asking is not the ten seconds of typing. It's social risk plus uncertainty plus delay. You are asking a lukewarm prospect to spend all three before they know whether you're even in their range. Meanwhile, the account they check next has a page with three packages and a number next to each. That business didn't out-market you. It just removed a chore.

This is the same logic behind every good link-in-bio decision. Every extra step between interest and action leaks people. We've written before about how your followers already think you're a business, and pricing is where that gap shows up most sharply: they're treating you like a company, and you're making them behave like a friend asking a favor.

The four reasons people hide prices, and what's actually true

Every objection to publishing prices is a real concern with a bad conclusion. Let's take them one at a time.

"My pricing is custom, so I can't post a number"

Almost nobody's pricing is genuinely custom. What you have is a range with variables. A wedding photographer charges differently for six hours than for twelve, but they are not pulling a number out of the air each time. A consultant scopes each project, but there's a floor below which they won't get out of bed.

Publish the floor. "Projects start at $2,400." "Half-day sessions from $600." "Most clients spend between $1,500 and $4,000 depending on scope." Every one of those is honest, none of them locks you in, and all of them do the one job that matters: they let a stranger self-select in or out before either of you spends time.

The fear here is that a starting price scares people off. It does. That's the feature. The people it scares off were never going to buy at $2,400, and you were going to find that out anyway, four messages later.

"If I post prices, competitors will undercut me"

Your competitors already know what you charge. They've asked. They've had friends ask. In a small market, pricing is the worst-kept secret there is, and the only person operating without the information is the customer who wanted to hire you.

Undercutting is also not the threat it feels like. If the only reason someone chooses you is that you're the cheapest, you have a problem no amount of secrecy will fix. The businesses that survive on price transparency are the ones who pair the number with the reason: what's included, how long it takes, what the outcome looks like. That's a positioning exercise, and it's one you can only run in public.

"I want to explain the value first"

This is the most sympathetic objection and the one that fails hardest in practice, because it assumes you'll get the chance. You don't get to explain the value in the DM if the DM never gets sent.

Your page is where you explain the value. Not in a sales call you have to earn first: right there, next to the number, in three lines. "Full brand identity, four weeks, includes logo, palette, type system, and a one-page guideline doc. From $3,200." You just explained the value and quoted the price in the same breath, to everyone who visits, forever, without answering a single message.

"Nobody in my industry does this"

Increasingly untrue, and it's the best argument for doing it. In categories where price opacity is the norm, being the one business that publishes rates reads as confidence. It signals that you're not adjusting the number based on how expensive someone's profile picture looks. Customers notice that. It's a trust signal disguised as a logistics decision.

What price transparency does to the people who do message you

The overlooked benefit isn't more inquiries. It's often fewer, and better ones.

When your rates are public, the DMs you get come from people who have already read the number and decided they're fine with it. The conversation starts at "can you do the week of the 14th?" instead of "hi, just wondering how much?" You stop spending your evenings writing polite price quotes to people who wanted something a third of that.

Business owners who publish rates for the first time usually report the same shape of result: inquiry volume drops, booking rate climbs, and the emotional overhead of the inbox falls through the floor. You are no longer the bottleneck in your own sales process. Your page answers the question while you sleep, which is exactly the argument we made in turning your page into a booking machine: the goal is a link that does the qualifying so you can do the work.

There's a second-order effect too. Publishing a number forces you to defend it to yourself. A lot of people discover, the week they finally write their prices down in public, that they've been undercharging for two years and were only getting away with it because the number lived in a DM where it could be quietly negotiated down. Daylight is good for pricing.

What to actually put on your page

You don't need a pricing table with feature checkmarks. You need enough for a stranger to decide. Here's the structure that works on a link-in-bio page, where you have a phone screen and about eight seconds.

Lead with the entry point, not the flagship. The first thing someone sees should be the smallest real way to work with you. A mini session, a single consult, a starter package. The flagship goes second. People buy up far more often than they talk themselves into the top tier cold.

Three options, maximum. Two is fine. Four is a decision problem. On a Liinks page you can give each package its own section with a short description and a price, and that vertical stack reads cleanly on a phone in a way a pricing table never will.

Put the number in the link label. Not "Learn more." Not "Book now." Try "Portrait session, from $450" or "90-minute strategy call, $250." The label is the highest-visibility text on the page, and burying the price one click deeper undoes the whole point. If you're going to be transparent, be transparent above the fold.

Say what's included in one line. Duration, deliverable, turnaround. That's it. Three facts is enough to make a price feel fair, and it's the difference between "$450" reading as expensive and "$450, 90 minutes, 25 edited images, delivered in one week" reading as reasonable.

Add the honest caveat, briefly. "Travel outside the metro billed separately." "Rush turnaround adds 20%." One line. This is where the "it depends" energy goes, and it's much better placed as a footnote than as a reason to hide the entire number.

Give the undecided a second door. Not everyone is ready to book. Put a lower-commitment option beside the paid ones: a free guide, a waitlist, a newsletter signup. If someone isn't buying today, capturing them beats losing them. For local businesses especially, that second door does a lot of work, which we covered in more detail in smart bio link ideas for brick-and-mortar businesses.

Then watch what happens. This is where the analytics on your Liinks page stop being a vanity number and start being a pricing tool. If the $450 tier gets four times the clicks of the $1,200 tier but neither converts, your problem isn't the price, it's what happens after the click. If nobody clicks the entry package at all, your entry package is priced like a flagship. You can only learn any of this if the numbers are on the page in the first place.

The version of this that isn't about money at all

Strip away the conversion argument and there's a simpler reason to do this: it's kinder.

Every person who has to DM you for prices is a person you've made slightly uncomfortable. They have to reveal their interest before they know if they can afford it. They have to sit through a wait wondering if they're about to be quoted something humiliating. Then, if the number is too high, they have to write the awkward "thanks, I'll think about it" message and never come back to your account again, because now it's weird.

You did that. Not on purpose, but you built the room that made it happen.

Publishing your prices hands people back the ability to make a private decision. They can look, do the math, and either book or move on without ever having to perform interest they don't have. Most of them will move on. Some of them will remember that you were easy to understand and come back in six months when the budget exists. Zero of them will feel managed.

That's a good trade for a number on a page.

TL;DR

"DM for prices" doesn't protect your value. It adds social risk, uncertainty, and delay to the exact moment someone was ready to buy.
Custom pricing is not an excuse. Publish a floor or a range: "from $X" is honest, non-binding, and lets people self-select.
Competitors already know your rates. The only person kept in the dark is the customer.
Transparency usually means fewer inquiries and more bookings, because the people who message you have already accepted the number.
On your page: lead with the entry-level option, cap it at three tiers, put the price in the link label, add one line of what's included, and give undecided visitors a low-commitment second door.
Use your click data to price better. You can't learn anything from a number nobody can see.

Put your prices where people can find them

If your rates currently live in a DM thread you have to re-type every week, move them. Give each offer its own section, put the number in the button, and let your page do the qualifying before anyone reaches your inbox.

Liinks is built for exactly this: clean, customizable sections, buttons you control the copy on, and analytics that tell you which price people actually click. It takes about fifteen minutes to build the page, and roughly the same amount of time to stop dreading your DMs.

Start your page for free and put a number on it.