What ghosting actually costs

Where it happens

The enquiry

A message arrives, questions get answered, and the thread stops. Cheap, and mostly noise.

The scoping call

An hour of unpaid consulting, often the most valuable hour in the whole engagement, followed by nothing.

The proposal

Real work: estimating, structuring, sometimes designing an approach. Handed over in full, then no answer either way.

The trial task

Delivered work, unpaid by agreement, on the promise of a decision that never comes.

The invoice

The work is done and delivered. Silence here is not ghosting so much as non-payment wearing its clothes.

Why it is asymmetric

The party that stops replying pays nothing. Not answering is cheaper than answering, faster than answering, and avoids an awkward message. The entire cost sits with the person still waiting, who additionally cannot tell a slow decision apart from a dead one and so keeps the slot open.

Why the usual advice does not fix it

• "Charge for scoping calls" works only once you can afford to lose the ones who would have said yes.
• "Take a deposit" addresses non-payment, not the earlier stages where most of the unpaid time goes.
• "Use a platform with reviews" moves the problem: on most platforms only completed contracts can be reviewed, so the conversations that die before a contract exists leave no trace at all.

That last gap — the stages that generate no reviewable record — is the part worth attacking.