Publish the price. It's the whole enquiry form.
Hiding your rates behind “call for pricing” doesn't protect your margin. It just moves the first conversation to a competitor who published theirs.
Most trade and hire websites in New Zealand do the same thing: they describe the gear in detail, then stop dead at the number. “Contact us for a quote.” “Call for pricing.” The logic is that a phone call is a chance to sell, and a published rate is a chance to be undercut.
In practice it does something else. It turns a two-minute decision into a task the customer has to schedule — during business hours, on the phone, with someone they've never met. Plenty of them just don't. They go to whoever published a number.
What we did for Lewis Excavator Hire
Lewis Excavator Hire runs Kubota diggers from 1.7 to 5.5 tonne plus a tipper truck out of Christchurch. When we rebuilt their site, every machine got its day rate published on the page — no gate, no form, no “from” pricing that means nothing. The trailer being included on the mini excavator is stated on the page rather than discovered on the phone.
Underneath, the rate isn't a number typed into a page. It's a field in a fleet dashboard the owner controls. Change a rate once and it updates everywhere the machine appears — listing, detail page, checkout. There is no version of the site that quietly disagrees with itself.
From there the booking is two clicks: pick the machine and the dates, pay through Stripe. The enquiry and the payment are the same action, so nothing sits in an inbox waiting to be converted into a job.
What publishing a rate actually costs you
The fear is that competitors will read your prices. They will. They were going to ring up and ask anyway, and they'd have got the number in about ninety seconds. What you lose is a small amount of pricing opacity. What you gain is every customer who was never going to make the call.
The second objection is more legitimate: not every job is a standard job. That's fine — publish the standard rate and make the exceptions obvious. A day rate for a 3-tonne digger is a real number. A complicated multi-week hire with operator and float still gets a conversation. You're not committing to quote every possible job on a web page; you're refusing to make the simple ones hard.
The test
Look at your own site and count the clicks between a customer landing on it and knowing what something costs. If the answer is “they have to ring us,” that's not a pricing strategy. That's a form of friction you're paying for in enquiries you never hear about.
You cannot lose a job to a competitor who published their rate if the customer never got far enough to compare.