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You've counted the calls, the prep, the follow-up, the software, the tax. Changed the number. Slept on it. Changed it back. Asked two friends. Opened the spreadsheet again, like cell D17 is finally going to tell you whether charging this makes you a bad person.
It can't.
A spreadsheet can tell you whether the offer works on paper. It can't answer the moral question you've attached to the number.
And I don't want to wave that off. Three thousand dollars is real money. You know what it could pay for. You can picture a deeply deserving person who needs your work and doesn't have it. That awareness is part of what makes you thoughtful about how you sell.
But there's a point where empathy stops informing the decision and starts making the decision for every imagined buyer. Their rent, their debt, their childcare, their partner's opinion, their fear — all sitting in your spreadsheet before the offer's even met one actual human.
That's too much for one price to carry.
Pricing and accessibility are related — not the same decision
When the two get collapsed together, your highest-touch offer usually ends up underpriced. Then you need more clients to make the numbers work, have less capacity to actually serve them, and have almost nothing left to build the accessible option you cared about in the first place.
A stronger model separates three layers.
1. Price the direct-access offer for its real delivery load
Count more than contact hours.
Include:
- live delivery
- prep and review
- follow-up
- admin
- the emotional labour
- the time blocked before and after high-intensity work
- overhead
- how many clients you can actually hold at once
Why it works: it prices the real container, not just the visible appointment. An hour-long call is rarely one hour of business capacity.
2. Decide what level of access each person is actually buying
People don't all need the same proximity to you.
- Private offer: direct application, personal feedback, the highest level of access
- Group offer: a shared method, live guidance, some individual support
- Workshop: one immediate problem, taught and practised in one session
- Resource: something self-directed for someone who needs a smaller first step
Why it works: it creates real choice without discounting your most capacity-heavy work.
3. Choose an accessibility mechanism on purpose
That might be a payment plan, a set number of reduced-fee spots, funded seats, a lower-proximity format, or free public teaching.
Choose the mechanism and its boundary before the sales conversation. Don't invent a new price every time you imagine somebody's situation.
Why it works: it becomes part of the business model, not an emotional negotiation you're having fresh with every buyer.
4. Name what the price has come to mean
Finish this sentence, unpolished:
If I charge this amount, people might think I'm ______.
Greedy. Inaccessible. Full of myself. Less caring. Too ambitious.
The thought isn't proof the price is wrong. It just tells you what social or identity risk has gotten tangled up with the number.
Why it works: you stop asking the spreadsheet to answer a fear it was never built for.
A simple three-door example
A practitioner might offer:
- a $3,000 private container with direct application and personal feedback
- a $450 group experience teaching the same core method, less individual access
- a $49 workshop solving one immediate problem
Those numbers are examples, not a prescription. The point is the shape: the private offer isn't supposed to be everyone's door.
Accessibility becomes something you design into the business, not something you quietly pay for through chronic undercharging.
Your assignment
Draw three columns:
- Viable price: what does the direct-access offer need to cost to support its real delivery load?
- Access options: what other level of proximity, format, or funding could create another door?
- Meaning: what are you afraid the viable price says about you?
Make one decision in each column. Don't use a discount to solve all three at once.
