Why our consulting prices are on the website

Published: 17 July 2026 · Updated: 26 August 2026 · 10 min readPricesConsulting practice

Why our consulting prices are on the website

Ask three consultancies what a project costs and you will usually get three meetings before you get one number. We do it differently. Hamnett Enterprises GmbH publishes 34 prices, from €900 for a short piece of copywriting to €9,500 for custom software, each with the minimum scope it buys, and every practice page states the range its projects land in. Only board mandates and transaction work stay individually negotiated. Below is the reasoning, the published evidence we priced against, and the rule that decides what happens when a buyer asks for a discount.

The decision

Every repeatable piece of work we sell carries a visible entry price with a named minimum scope. Every scoped project carries a published range and then a written fixed price, agreed before anyone starts. Board seats, advisory retainers and transaction support carry a published structure and no figure. We give no discounts: when a buyer pushes on price, a deliverable comes out of the scope instead. If more than half of the first 20 proposals we send after 20 August 2026 fail on price alone, the published numbers are too high for owner-run firms and the affected lines go back one step.

What a visible number does to an enquiry

Gartner surveyed 646 business-to-business buyers and found 67% prefer a buying process with no sales representative, up from 61% the year before (Gartner, March 2026). That majority has done most of its comparing before anyone picks up a phone. A services website with no price signal is not neutral in front of them. It drops off the shortlist quietly, and nobody writes to say why.

A published range does four things before a conversation exists. It removes the call that was never going to fit the budget, on both sides. It forces us to describe the work precisely enough to stand behind a number in public. It puts the first conversation on the work rather than on the fee. And it makes the price credibly non-negotiable, because a number printed on a public page cannot quietly become a different number for one buyer.

The cost of publishing belongs in the same paragraph. A from-price is an anchor every reader sees, including a corporate department buying the same scope out of a budget rather than out of an owner's own money. We accept that, because the reader this business is priced for is the managing director of a 5-to-150-person company in Frankfurt and the wider Rhein-Main region who wants a number before a meeting.

Where a fixed price fits, where a range fits, and what stays private

Price shape Where it applies What we publish Why this shape
Fixed from-price Repeatable, productised work: technical SEO review €1,900, one-day training €3,400, indicative valuation €3,900, business website €6,500 The number and the minimum scope it buys You know these offers from other providers, so you should be able to compare them without a discovery call
Published range, then a fixed quote Scoped project consulting: strategy, operations, market entry, automation, AI adoption, succession preparation The range its projects land in, then a written fixed price within 48 hours of a free 30-minute scoping call The same question can be a two-week study or a two-month programme. Pricing before scoping would be guessing in public
Structure only, priced per mandate Board seats, advisory retainers, transaction support The structure (annual retainer for a Beirat seat, monthly for advisory, project fee for transaction work) and no figure The value spread between a small company and a large one runs to several multiples, the liability differs by as much, and one public number would misprice most cases

As of August 2026, all prices net of VAT.

Hourly billing is the one model we do not sell. It pays for time rather than for a result, it puts the risk of a job running long on the client, and it pays the adviser more for working slowly. Where delivery is AI-assisted it hands the whole efficiency gain to whoever holds the stopwatch. A fixed price puts that risk on us, which is why the scope is written down first.

The five published findings behind the rule

What the research says The figure Source What we do about it
Price is the highest-leverage line On an average S&P 1500 income statement, 1% more realised price lifts operating profit by roughly 8%, about three times the effect of 1% more volume McKinsey, "The power of pricing" Fixed price for a defined scope, so the gain from delivering faster stays with whoever built the speed
Most firms do not price on value Over 80% price primarily on cost or on competitors, so fewer than one in five price on value delivered Hinterhuber, Journal of Business Strategy 29(4), 2008, 81 executives An hourly rate is a cost price. It says nothing about what the result is worth
Buyers want to buy without being sold to 67% of 646 buyers prefer a rep-free process, up from 61% Gartner, March 2026 The price list serves that majority without a meeting
Planned increases mostly do not land Firms achieve 32% of a planned increase on average, and 97 in 100 miss their own target, across almost 2,000 companies Simon-Kucher Global Pricing & Sales Study 2017 A 4% indexation each January is a clause in every retainer, so there is nothing to renegotiate
A discount buys a worse customer Customers acquired through aggressive discounting showed 32.41% lower lifetime value and churned faster, across 88 software companies Paddle, July 2022 No discounts. A lower number buys a smaller scope at the same rate

As of August 2026, sources retrieved 26 August 2026.

One further finding shapes the grid rather than the policy. Precise first offers anchor harder than round ones (Mason, Lee, Wiley and Ames, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 49(4), 2013). Our internal pricing note recorded that paper as covering "49 studies", which was the journal volume number read as a count of studies. We caught it checking the citation for this post and corrected it. The finding itself stands, and in practice the public grid keeps a house pattern (€900, €1,400, €1,900, €2,400, €2,900, €3,400, €3,900, €4,900, €6,500, €7,500, €9,500) while a quote above the grid is given as a precise figure such as €7,850 rather than €8,000.

That leverage also decides what happens at the discount question. A 10% concession on a €4,900 project is €490 of revenue and close to €490 of profit, because delivery cost does not fall when the invoice does. So the answer to "can you do it for €3,900?" is never yes and never no. It is a question about scope: which of the two workshops comes out, whether the second site stays in, whether the implementation review is still part of it. That takes five minutes and leaves the price list intact for the next reader.

What this means for you

If you are buying consulting

  • The number is on the page before you write to us. All six practices, 34 fixed prices from €900 net, each with its minimum scope, and travel inside the Rhein-Main region included.
  • A project larger than a minimum scope gets a written fixed-price proposal within 48 hours of a free 30-minute scoping call. The line-by-line comparison against the German market sits in what consulting costs in Germany: 34 prices vs the market.
  • Push on scope rather than on price. Ask what comes out at €3,900 that was in at €4,900 and you get a specific answer.

If you sell consulting or agency work

  • A published price is a commitment to a described scope. Work you cannot describe in a paragraph cannot carry a public number, and that is a scoping problem before it is a pricing one.
  • Treat a discount as a profit decision. At the leverage above it is worth several times its face value at the operating line, and the billing data says the customer it buys is worth about a third less.

Where we could be wrong

  • If more than half of the first 20 proposals we send after 20 August 2026 fail on price alone, the August increases were too large for owner-run firms and the affected lines go back one step.
  • If the BDU fee study 2026 reports the average German consulting day rate more than 5% down in December, under €1,235, the grid sits above a falling market and every line raised in August 2026 gets re-examined.
  • The Gartner figure is a global sample summarised in a press release whose method is not public. If a German study finds owner-run Mittelstand buyers prefer a conversation before a number, the rep-free argument is the wrong argument for this market.
  • The discount evidence is subscription-software billing data across 88 companies rather than German consulting. And if our win rate on published prices settles above 70%, the numbers are too low: the grid moves up, the no-discount rule stays.

FAQ

Do you negotiate on price?

No, and we negotiate on scope instead. Every published number buys a named minimum scope, and a smaller budget buys a smaller scope at the same rate. The reason is arithmetic: a concession on a fixed-price project comes almost entirely out of profit, and billing data across 88 software companies found discount-acquired customers worth 32.41% less over their lifetime (Paddle, July 2022).

What does "from €4,900" actually mean?

It is the price of the smallest version of that service, with the scope named on the page. For business strategy that minimum is one company, five to eight interviews, two workshops and a written strategy with a 12-month roadmap. Anything larger is quoted as its own fixed price in writing within 48 hours of a free scoping call. The from-price is a floor and an anchor rather than a cap on what you can buy.

Why is there no price for a board seat?

Because one number would be wrong for almost every case. A Beirat seat at a company with €2M of revenue and one at a company with €80M differ by several multiples in work, exposure and value to the shareholder, and the personal liability of an advisory mandate is not comparable to a consulting project. What we publish is the structure: annual retainer for a board seat, monthly retainer for advisory work, project fee for transaction support. The figure follows the mandate and is fixed in writing before it starts.

Does publishing prices not just let a competitor undercut you?

It shows them a number they could have got from any client anyway. The published price is half of what is on the page, and the minimum scope beside it is the half that is hard to copy. A competitor who undercuts the number without matching the scope is making a different offer, and a buyer can now see that in two minutes rather than in the third meeting. The bigger risk runs the other way: three of our lines sat below the floor the cheapest German providers set for themselves, which is a scoping error rather than an advantage, and we raised 21 prices in August 2026 because of it.

Further reading

Sources

← All posts