Eight Swiss landscaping websites, one shows a price

The findings

On 9 August 2026 I opened eight websites of Swiss landscaping and garden care firms and applied four criteria I had fixed beforehand. All eight offer maintenance or garden care, seven have a dedicated page for it. Exactly one shows a price on that page.

The rest of the findings is just as thin. Two in eight state how many visits per year a tier contains. Two in eight say anything about term or cancellation. Two in eight have a form on the subscription page that takes an enquiry for that specific plan; on the others the button leads to the general contact page, or there is simply a phone number.

One thing up front, so nobody reads a promise into this: “gartenpflege abo” gets around 30 searches a month in Switzerland, “gartenunterhalt abo” none at all (Ubersuggest, Switzerland and German, checked on 9 August 2026). So a subscription page brings no traffic. It is the page someone lands on who has already found you, and there it is decided whether they call or click away.

How I went about it

I opened eight websites and asked four questions of each, the same ones, in the same order:

1. Does it say which work a tier contains and how many visits per year go with it?
2. Is there a price, or at least a range?
3. Is there anything about term and cancellation?
4. Can I order or request the plan on this page, or do I have to reach for the phone?

I do not name the firms. This is about the pattern, not about people, and none of these firms did anything wrong; they simply all failed to do the same thing.

Two limitations, because they belong to a clean report. First: eight websites are a sample, not a survey. Second, and this matters more: I found some of these pages through search terms containing the word for subscription. The sample is therefore skewed in favour of firms that name a plan at all. Even in that favourable selection, the price is missing seven times.

The pattern, in four forms

The plan as a menu item. The navigation says “Maintenance”. Click it and you land on a page with the word “Maintenance” as a heading, an image gallery and nothing else. Not one sentence about what the firm actually takes over, no frequency, no price, no form. On the home page, maintenance appears in a list next to fencing and playground construction. This occurs twice.

The dedicated subscription page without a single number. This is the most common case. There is a properly built page, it explains in five paragraphs why a plan is a good thing, it lists the activities, it even has a multi-step enquiry form. And apart from the address it contains no number. On one of these pages, under the heading “Transparent prices”, stands the sentence that prices are clear and free of hidden costs and that you can plan exactly what you get and what it costs. Directly below it, no amount. That is not meant dishonestly, it simply escapes notice while writing.

The tiers are there, the price is missing with a reason. One page does almost everything right: three tiers, each with the number of visits per year, with counted work (two hedge cuts, eleven lawn mowings, twelve green waste removals), with “Term: 12 months” and with a section on what is explicitly not included and gets billed separately. Only the price is missing, with a reasonable explanation: it depends on the size of the garden, they will come by and quote. The button says “Order plan” and leads to the general contact page.

The complete plan, filed under news. One page describes seven packages, plus billing, a trial year and annual cancellation. That is more substance than on the other seven combined. Only it is not an offer in the menu but a post in the news section, dated 2022, with a reading-time note like a blog article. Way to order: call or send an email.

The exception looks like this: one firm shows two yearly plans side by side, from CHF 490 and from CHF 790 per year, each excluding VAT, with service points and partly with frequency (“fertilising 2 times a year”). Below that a button and a form asking for the approximate lawn area. It is the only one of the eight pages where, as a garden owner, I know what we are talking about before I call. Even there, term and cancellation are missing.

What the customer finds instead

The price question does not disappear when your page leaves it unanswered. It just gets answered somewhere else.

On 9 August 2026 I checked what ranks in Switzerland for “gartenpflege kosten”, the German phrase for garden care costs (Ubersuggest, Switzerland and German). The first ten organic results contain no landscaping firm at all. What sits there are comparison and advice portals, above them a Google AI summary and the block of related questions.

What those portals deliver is more concrete than what I found on seven of the eight websites:

Honesty requires the caveat: the CHF 740 is an average across individual jobs on a quotation portal, not the price of a yearly plan. You cannot derive a subscription from it. But it is the figure your customer walks into the conversation with, and it carries a date and a sample size. Your website has nothing at that spot.

That is not an accusation. Portals make a living from answering price questions, a landscaping firm makes a living from something else. The firm just carries the consequence: the customer forms an expectation around a stranger’s number, and afterwards you negotiate against it.

What belongs on a subscription page so that it closes

Six things. None of them requires a new service, all six already sit in your quotes.

Scope per tier, in work and visits per year. Not “regular care”, but twelve visits, two hedge cuts, eleven lawn mowings. The one page in my sample that does this is precisely the one where, after reading, I would know which tier suits me.

A price or an explained range. An amount per year is best. If that is impossible, then a range and a sentence on what drives it. “From CHF 490 a year” answers more questions than three paragraphs about passion.

Term and cancellation. Twelve months, then cancellable annually, in one sentence. This is the point where private customers hesitate, and the point seven in eight pages do not mention. Whoever answers it removes the biggest brake.

Who comes and how often. Not just the number of visits, but also: the same team, announced or unannounced, with or without you being there. A customer handing over a key or gate access wants to know to whom.

What is explicitly not included. Crown work on trees, irrigation systems, lawn renovation, snow clearing, disposal beyond the usual volume. One of the eight pages does this under a heading meaning “good to know”, and it is the section that builds the most trust. Whoever says what is not included is believed about what is.

A way to order, on the page. A form that carries the chosen tier along and asks for area, place and preferred date. A phone number is not a way to order for someone reading at half past nine in the evening on the sofa. Two in eight pages have such a form.

Disclosure: I sell a subscription myself

I am not writing this as a bystander. I sell a subscription myself: maintenance for CHF 79 a month, hosting included. Hosting on its own for CHF 19 exists only in exceptional cases. The prices are on the Maintenance page, and what sits behind them is broken down in What does website maintenance cost in Switzerland?.

Three things I learned from it, and all three apply to a garden plan just as well.

First: a fixed scope matters more than a low price. As long as it does not say what is included, you renegotiate with every enquiry, and the customer compares you against something he pieced together himself.

Second: a visible price filters. Whoever has read the amount and writes anyway has already accepted the order of magnitude. The first conversation is then about the work and not about the number.

Third: easy cancellation sells better than a long commitment. Someone who knows he can get out again says yes faster.

And the sentence that goes with it: when a plan is not worth it for someone, I say so. In my case that is the static site that stays unchanged for a year. In yours it might be the customer with forty square metres of lawn and one hedge, who is better off with two visits a year than with a plan. Saying that costs you one signature and gains you a customer who stays.

Where a fixed price would not be honest

There are cases where a fixed yearly rate would not be honest. Plot size, tree stock, slope, machine access and the volume of green waste vary so much that two gardens with the same square metres mean different amounts of work. Write a fixed price there and you either calculate too high and lose enquiries, or too low and spend a year working against it.

The answer is not “price on request” but a range plus a site visit. So: from and to, and underneath three lines on which factors push a garden towards the upper end. Your own costing already supplies those factors, so you give nothing away. And the site visit stays what it is: the step that turns a range into a quote.

“Price on request” is the most expensive version of this. It costs you every visitor who is not yet far enough along to pick up the phone, and that is most of them.

The year, without invented curves

On seasonality I deliberately give no figures. I have no solid Swiss data on how demand for garden maintenance spreads across the year. The monthly values my tool reports for “gartenpflege abo” swing between 10 and 170 searches within twelve months, on an average of 30. Drawing a seasonal curve from that would be invention.

Something can still be said qualitatively, because it comes from the work and not from a chart. In spring capacity is tight anyway. There the website should not produce more enquiries but the right ones: put the waiting time in writing instead of explaining it on the first call. “Taking on maintenance plans from June” costs you a few enquiries you could not have served anyway and saves you the rejections.

In autumn and winter it is the other way round. That is when maintenance, snow clearing and the planning for next season belong at the front, because there is time and because a plan signed in October is plannable from spring onwards.

Plus the effort note I give myself: whoever rebuilds the home page four times a year needs the time for it or an arrangement with someone who does it. Four rebuilds a year sound like little and are four appointments that will certainly get lost in spring. Two changes, spring and autumn, actually carried through, are more realistic. What that ongoing work costs is in Does my website need maintenance? and in What does a website cost in Switzerland?.

Conclusion

The maintenance plan is the most plannable product a landscaping firm has, and on seven of the eight websites reviewed it sits there in a form you cannot order. The customer asks the price question regardless, it just gets answered by a comparison portal, with a figure, a sample size and a date. What is missing is not a new service but the existing one written down in six points. Where a fixed price does not work, a range with an explanation of what drives it will do.

If you want to get your plan onto your site and do not know how to phrase the price part without underselling yourself, drop me a line via Contact, or have a look at how I build sites under Webdesign. I reply within one business day (Mon to Fri).