I put my prices in my bio for a month and nobody said anything
been running an experiment since mid october. put "8x10 = $180, 18x24 = $650" right in my bio, top line, before the "i don't do logos for exposure" bit.
not one person has mentioned it. no lowball offers. no "wow that's expensive" DMs. nothing. what i did get: three inquiries that skipped the whole "so how much would something like this be" dance and went straight to "can you do a 16x20 of my dog." closed two of them in under a week, which for me is warp speed, normally i lose people in the four-day gap between their first message and my reply because i'm bad at email.
the weird part is i put this off for a literal year because i was convinced a number in the bio would scare off the casual followers and make me look like a shop instead of an artist. turns out the casual followers aren't the ones buying and the buyers just want to know if they can afford you before they invest emotionally in liking the work.
still not sure it's "working" so much as it's not actively hurting. the sample size is like five people. but i've stopped writing the price paragraph in every second message and that alone is worth it. curious if anyone else has tried the same thing and gotten the opposite result, because i keep waiting for the other shoe.
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This is really interesting because I think the "nobody said anything" part is actually the whole point. People who were never going to pay your price just quietly moved on instead of wasting your week, and the ones who messaged already knew so they got straight to business. I put a starting range on my page last year and had the exact same thing, no drama, just fewer tire kickers. The one thing I'd watch is whether $650 still fits if a piece takes you way longer than expected, I've under-priced myself on a big commission before and it stung. But yeah, putting it out front is the move.
The $650 concern is the one worth sitting with, and I would put it more bluntly than "watch it": a flat rate on a large commission is a bet that you have estimated the hours correctly, and most of us are optimistic estimators. I would rather see a stated base plus a clear note about complexity, so you are not renegotiating in your own head halfway through a piece. The filtering part of your comment is right, though. Silence is the filter working.
ok the "renegotiating in your own head" thing got me because that's exactly what happens. i don't haggle with the client, i just quietly start resenting the piece around hour 30 and do the math on what i'm making per hour and get depressed. so the enemy was never them, it was me doing math at 2am.
base plus complexity note is probably right. my fear is that "complexity" becomes the new dance, like now i have to explain why the dog is a $900 dog and not a $650 dog. but i'd rather have that fight before i start than during.
the tire kicker thing is real, i just didn't expect them to be so quiet about it. i was braced for at least one "wow okay good luck" and got nothing. kind of eerie honestly.
the underpricing thing is the part i'm chewing on. $650 is fine for a face with no complications but i did a 18x24 recently that turned into six weeks of me repainting one ear like an idiot, and at that point the hourly is like $4 and a half. so yeah, that's less a price and more a vibe. thinking the move is to keep the number up front but say "starts at" so i don't trap myself in my own bio.