My wife and I recently went through the initial process of building a home. We love the neighbourhood we’re currently in but wanted to build a house with all the features missing from our current home. After placing a hold on the lot, deciding on a style and getting our mortgage in order, we sat down with the developer to review options.

To no surprise, what was presented in the marketing was a far cry from what you’ll actually end up paying for your home.

We were given the base price and then needed a calculator to keep up with all the add-ons. Do you want a few more meters of green space? $20,000. Do you want to upgrade the bargin cabinets that come standard? $10,000. Do you hate ‘popcorn’ ceilings? $500 to get rid of them.

When Build puts together an estimate for a customer, we want to make sure all the costs are laid out and easily understood. You tell us what you want and we’ll tell you what it will cost. It’s not going to be higher and it’s probably not going to be lower.

All told, if we didn’t want the standard, lower quality finishes, we were going to pay for it.

This didn’t surprise us. We should have to pay for quality. What annoyed us was how the home builder hid these costs from us until after we were already in love the home and dead-set on building. Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed (my wife’s) and we withdrew the deposit on our lot and decided to wait to build our dream home.

This got me to thinking about pricing in design and development.

When Build puts together an estimate for a customer, we want to make sure all the costs are laid out and easily understood. You tell us what you want and we’ll tell you what it will cost. It’s not going to be higher and it’s probably not going to be lower.

Like home builders, if what you want is above and beyond the standard, it will cost more. However, we’ll lay those costs out to you in the estimate and explain why there are additional costs. We’ll also include suggestions for items you may not have included in your project outline that we suggest all self-maintained websites have. Things like web analytics and a content management system.

We aspire to be transparent and forthcoming with our pricing. Surprises piss us off and I’m sure they do our clients as well. Dropping an additional cost bomb on them will likely mean they won’t be returning for repeat business or referring you.

Don’t give your customers a reason to distrust the numbers presented to them. Be clear and up-front. But most importantly, show them the numbers.

This post was updated from an early post dated August 14, 2012