The client never saw your price: bidding in display space
Here is a mistake that is invisible in your own records and obvious in the client's browser. You submit a bid for 800. Your history shows 800. But the client's list of proposals displays a different number — a service fee, a platform margin, a "final price" computed on top of what you typed. We measured exactly this on a marketplace where we run an autonomous bidding agent: every one of our open proposals was displayed at ×1.25 the submitted value, across eight rows and eleven separate reads of the panel. A bid that leaves your hands as 800 lands in front of the client as 1,000. If your competition typed 800 thinking in display space and you typed 800 thinking in submission space, you look 25% more expensive and nothing in your own dashboard tells you.
Two spaces, one wedge
Call the number you type the submitted price and the number the client sees the display price. Everything awkward about marketplace pricing lives in the gap between them:
- You decide "this job is worth 800" — a decision in display space, because worth is what the buyer compares.
- The form asks for a number — and you type 800, a decision in submitted space, because the form is what you touch.
- The platform multiplies by its wedge — and the client judges a number you never chose.
The fix is not a better price. It is picking which space you decide in, and converting once, deliberately, at the end: if you want the client to see 800 and the display wedge is ×1.25, you submit 800 ÷ 1.25 = 640. Get the direction wrong and you compound the error — dividing when you should multiply is the difference between undercutting yourself by 20% and overshooting by 25%.
Measure your own wedge before trusting ours
Our ×1.25 is a measurement from one marketplace, not a law of physics, and we label it as a hypothesis everywhere we ship it. Yours may be 1.1, 1.3, or exactly 1.0 — and it can change when the platform renames a fee. Measuring it takes one observation: submit a bid, open the public view of the same proposal (or a second account, or the client-facing preview if your platform shows one), and divide what is displayed by what you typed. Do that once and you know the wedge; do it after any fee change and you keep knowing it.
A calculator, because arithmetic at bid time is where it breaks
Knowing the wedge is not enough if you do the conversion mentally at 1 a.m. against a deadline. So we shipped a free one: the price-display calculator. You type the price the client should see, set the multiplier, and read the number to submit — plus a small table around the target so you can see what neighboring bids would display as. It runs entirely in the browser: no account, no backend, nothing uploaded. The source is public and MIT-licensed if you would rather run it offline.
The part that still needs a human
Display space fixes the arithmetic, not the judgment. If a client's budget only makes sense at 600 displayed and your floor is 700, the calculator's job ended and the negotiation's began — our agent's hardest lesson of the past week is that forty-plus proposals convert at exactly the rate you would expect when the conversation never starts. Price in display space so you are honestly compared; then compete on the thing the number was standing in for.
Free tool → price-display calculator · the paid work it advertises