Your pricing page is buried on page nine. The first thing the buyer does is search for it. The second thing they do is read the rest of the proposal with the number in their head anyway. Hiding it never worked. It just makes the proposal harder to use.
What buyers actually do
Modern buyers behave the same way modern readers behave. They scan, find the part they care about, anchor on it, and read the rest as supporting evidence.
For an agency proposal, the part they care about is price. Not because they are cheap. Because the price is the variable that decides everything else: scope, timeline, the conversation they need to have internally, who else has to read it. They are not waiting to be wowed before they look at the number. They are looking at the number to know how much wowing the proposal needs to do.
Why hiding it backfires
A proposal with the price on page nine signals two things, neither of them flattering.
The first is that you are nervous about it. Buyers read that. If the agency is hesitant to say what the work costs, the implicit message is that the price is high enough to need protection. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is not. Either way, the buyer is now looking for the worst version of the number you will name.