Why This Matters: Across the industry, many companies and voices are insisting that transparent pricing is a competitive necessity. But to most high performance contractors, pricing a job before assessing the home seems like malpractice.
The Big Picture:
- AI search results, Google, software vendors and tech-forward startups are reshaping homeowner expectations around online pricing.
- High performance contractors face a real dilemma: instant online quoting often misleads, but silence about pricing also fails.
- Homeowners have a genuine and understandable hunger for better information about price, but that does not mean that exposing prices is a necessity.
What To Do: Build a pricing page. Make it the place where you explain to homeowners how pricing works. Decide for yourself whether to expose actual numbers.
Few topics in HVAC, home performance, and solar right now are louder than price transparency. To understand why, follow a typical homeowner.
Agatha has a comfort problem, opens Google and types "heat pump cost." What she sees first is no longer a list of contractor websites. She might see an AI Overview summarizing typical cost ranges before she's clicked anything. Filters for "Under $3500" and "Online estimates." A Local Service Ad with a "Get Quote" button. Sponsored listings from PE-backed companies offering instant quotes. Most contractor websites — if they appear at all — are further down the page.
Four forces are driving this redesign. Google and AI are doing the most to reshape expectations: "Get quote" filters in Business Profiles, "Have AI Get Prices" in Google's AI Mode, and ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity all happily generating cost ranges in seconds — with confidence the homeowner has no way to evaluate. The Silicon Valley crowd is moving fast to capitalize. Jetson, a venture-backed heat pump installer, promises a quote in two minutes, "no home visit, no pressure." Their pitch — "getting a heat pump used to mean contractor calls, site visits, and outdated systems" — cleanly insults every traditional contractor in a single breath. Software vendors are amplifying from inside the industry, selling instant quoting to contractors as the new table stakes. And contractors themselves are completing the circle by saying nothing at all. Silence on price has become its own signal.
On the surface, handing out prices before a home visit and diagnostics feels like high performance malpractice. Pricing a solution without understanding the problem strikes most good contractors as both wrong and impossible. But that isn't the whole story.
What's Actually Wrong With Online Quoting in High Performance
The primary flaw: online quoting tools assume the homeowner knows things they don't. The following are examples of real questions I've found on quote tools on actual contractor websites.
The simplest tools ask one question — "How many tons of cooling do you need?" — and deliver a like-size box swap. The more sophisticated tools fare worse. The homeowner is asked to choose from rim joist spray foam at $14 a linear foot ("Uh, what's a rim joist?"), 2-inch rigid foam board at R-14, a blower door test. Then: what's your current attic insulation level — None, Some, Inadequate ("less than R-38"), Adequate, Unknown? Is the existing material "wet, moldy, or pest-damaged"?
These are exactly the questions a competent contractor answers during a site visit. But they're being asked by someone who, ten minutes ago, was Googling "how much does insulation cost." The typical homeowner doesn't know whether their attic is at R-19 or R-38. They're guessing, and every guess moves the estimate by thousands of dollars. By the time the form is done, the screen lands on something like:
Estimated Project Total: $27,407 – $35,196
For a homeowner who started out curious about insulation, that number is a wall. It doesn't lead to a conversation; it ends one. That's the failure mode of instant online quoting in high performance work: enough specificity to be intimidating, not enough accuracy to be trusted.
When High Prices are a Filter You Want
An important caveat: some contractors want a high price as a filter. If the goal is to weed out lowball tire kickers, a big number will accomplish that in spades. More on this strategy below.
And Yet Homeowners Genuinely Want Pricing Information–Insights from Energy Circle’s Data
It needs to be said that homeowners of all income levels want to know about cost.
The scale of that demand surprises most contractors who see it for the first time. Across just five HVAC and insulation-related categories — heat pumps, HVAC systems, furnaces, air conditioners, and insulation — Semrush data shows roughly 81,000 distinct price-related keywords generating about 1.3 million Google searches every month, or roughly 15 million a year. That's not a niche of price-shoppers. It's a constant, nationwide drumbeat of homeowners typing some version of the question into Google or AI:
- “how much does a heat pump cost” (1,600 searches a month)
- “how much is a new furnace” (5,400 a month)
- “spray foam insulation cost” (5,400 a month)
- “heat pump installation prices” (9,900 a month)
Energy Circle's own data tells the same story from a different angle. Across roughly 12,600 client phone calls in a recent 90-day window — calls coming into HVAC, insulation, solar, and home performance contractors all over the country — about 28% reference price, cost, estimate, or quote in some way. Tighten the filter to homeowners who are clearly asking for pricing upfront — language like "ballpark," "rough estimate," "price range," "how much does it cost" — and it's still roughly 12%, or one in eight calls. These are real homeowners asking real contractors for some sense of what something might cost before they commit to anything else.
The richest part of our call data isn't the percentage — it's the language. The homeowners showing up in these calls are people who have already decided to pick up the phone and call a contractor, and they consistently hedge their price questions in the same handful of ways. "Just trying to get a ballpark." "Before we schedule anything." "I'd like a rough idea before having someone come out." "Can you give me a sense of what something like this runs?" (Actual quotes.) The hesitation in those phrasings is the sound of a homeowner who doesn't want to sound rude, but who is asking anyway, because they need to know.
And when they don't get a useful answer, the call transcripts show what happens next. Some say the tried and true: they'll discuss it with their spouse and call back — code for we don't know how to make a decision without a number, so we're going to go quiet. Some say they want to shop around first, meaning the next contractor on the list will get the same question and the same chance to answer it. A few say it out loud: they wanted a ballpark before scheduling, didn't get one, and aren't ready to schedule a visit without one. Conversation over; lead lost.
Marcus Sheridan and the Case for Saying Something
One of the most articulate voices on this is Marcus Sheridan. He was a pool contractor. When the 2008 housing crash gutted the pool business, he started writing blog posts answering every question customers had ever asked — including the ones the industry refused to talk about, like how much pools actually cost. River Pools became one of the most-trafficked swimming pool websites in the world, the company survived, and Sheridan wrote They Ask, You Answer, which has sold over 100,000 copies.
I spoke to Marcus at an event in Denver recently, and his argument is more careful than his fans give him credit for. He doesn't insist that contractors publish exact prices. He says homeowners are frustrated when pricing information is completely absent — when contractors dodge the topic, people assume the worst. The question for high performance contractors isn't whether to put exact numbers on a website. It's how to address the legitimate demand for price information in a way that doesn't undermine the high performance approach.
Why This Feels Harder in High Performance
Price questions matter most early — while homeowners are researching, before a site visit, often in the first phone call. That's precisely where high performance contractors feel most exposed. Many homeowners arrive having self-diagnosed a solution, with numbers in hand from AI chatbots and calculators built on assumptions that don't hold up.
High performance projects are categorically different because the scopes are fundamentally different. Quoting a heat pump replacement is not the same project as quoting a comfort and air-quality solution that includes envelope work, ventilation, and verified outcomes. They share a name and almost nothing else. Contractors are right to worry about being dismissed as "too expensive" before the value is visible. So many default to silence — which reads as avoidance.
Transparency Without Pretending Homes Are Interchangeable
The answer is to redefine transparency for a high performance context. Think of the goal as price orientation rather than price transparency: be transparent about how pricing works, rather than what the price is.
Build a real pricing page — and make it prominent in your website navigation. A substantive page that answers, in good faith, the question every homeowner arrives with. It's where the price question gets met with respect rather than deflected, and where the high performance approach gets explained at exactly the moment the homeowner is most motivated to understand it. Most high performance contractors don't have one.
The key elements:
- Name the friction up front. Homeowners came looking for a number; acknowledge it before explaining why a project-specific number isn't yet possible.
- Explain why diagnosis comes first. No doctor prices brain surgery sight unseen.
- List the variables that move a price. Home condition, scope, equipment, labor and access, rebates.
- Show, side by side, how the high performance approach differs from a typical contractor's. A comparison chart makes the bait-and-switch pattern visible without naming anyone.
- Tie pricing to your existing process. Lean into how much value gets delivered — listening, diagnostics, scoping — before any meaningful dollars change hands.
- Answer the questions homeowners actually ask. "Why won't you just give me a ballpark?" — written without dodging.
- Close with a low-friction next step. A phone conversation, not a site visit.
Energy Circle and Amply Energy have built a working example of what this page could look like on our high performance contractor prototype site: demo.energycircle.com/pricing.
When Showing Pricing is a Specific Strategy
Over the years, we've worked with many contractors who use transparent pricing as a filter. Their businesses have matured to the point where they can't afford to waste time with tire kickers, and they use pricing as a MERV 13+ way to devote time only to ideal-fit homeowners. If this is your approach, here are good ways to do it:
Show ranges, not promises. A heat pump retrofit on a 1980s ranch with adequate ductwork is one number; the same project on an 1890s farmhouse with knob-and-tube is another. Say so, with example ranges tied to conditions.
Use case studies with real scopes and real numbers. They do something a calculator can't: show the thinking behind the number.
Set a minimum investment threshold and say it. "Our typical whole-house projects start at $X" filters mismatches in seconds.
What's right for your company is a business strategy decision. Having seen so many high performance jobs sold that started as a single-measure lead, I encourage most contractors to get the opportunity for a conversation. Small companies swamped with work can use pricing as the filter.
Price Conversations as a Differentiation Opportunity
As much as early price questions can strike fear in high performance contractors, they're also an opening. Handled well, they become a chance to explain why swapping a box or adding the cheapest attic insulation may not solve the problem — and to quietly distinguish your approach from bait-and-switch quoting without ever naming competitors. Price orientation is often the first opening to explain the value of the high performance approach.