There are three reasons: 1) The sort of people who pass through the existing filters I have in place (I show some prices on the contact form) who have unfunded

There are three reasons: 1) The sort of people who pass through the existing filters I have in place (I show some prices on the contact form) who have unfunded projects will claim that they are funded. The question has a shannon entropy of zero. 2) Everyone, funded or not, is cagey about the actual budget. In the iOS world, "funded" can mean anything from $500 to $500,000. If I say "So, what are you looking to spend?" they will reply "I'm not really sure what the project will cost, can you estimate it for me?" You get this line the same from a CEO or from an intern, from a bank manager or from an unemployed person calling on a payphone. If I say "Our average project cost is X", I am turning away some projects we could legitimately do for less than X with a very comfortable margin while accidentally dangling a carrot in front of a client who has a project that's really 3 * X. The former is an invisible cost, the latter may mean lots of time spent on useless estimates instead of actual billable work. 3) I used to have an e-mail autoresponder that would inquire about budgets, but on a typical day I started spending more time reading replies to my autoresponder than writing actual code. asking the question isn't scalable.