The honest answer: your first price should be high enough that the sale proves something, and low enough that you can say it out loud without flinching. For most professionals selling expertise in the US or Canada, that lands somewhere between $500 and $3,000 for a defined project, or $75 to $200 an hour if you insist on billing time. But those are starting points, not answers: because the right price isn't calculated, it's tested.
Here's the part almost nobody says: pricing is not a math problem you solve once at your desk. It's a hypothesis. You pick a defensible number, put it in front of real buyers, and read what happens. The math below gets you to a number worth testing in about twenty minutes.
Step 1: Find your floor with salary math
Your floor is the price below which the work isn't worth doing. It's easy to calculate and most beginners set it far too low, because they compare a project rate to their salary rate and forget everything the salary was hiding.
Start with what your time is already worth at work:
- Take your annual salary and divide by 2,000 (roughly a full-time year). A $120,000 salary is about $60/hour.
- Multiply by 1.3 to 1.4 for the benefits, payroll taxes and paid time off your employer covers and a client won't. Now you're at $78–$84/hour.
- Multiply by 1.5 to 2 for unbillable time: sales calls, proposals, invoicing, revisions, the hours you spend looking for the next client. Independent work typically bills 50–65% of the hours it consumes.
That $120,000 salary implies a floor around $120–$165/hour of billed time. Not because you're suddenly worth double, but because a freelance hour has to pay for the hour beside it that nobody pays for.
If that number feels absurd, sit with it. The gap between what it feels like you can charge and what the work is actually worth is the single most expensive belief in a new service business.
Step 2: Set the ceiling with the value of the outcome
The floor is about you. The ceiling is about the buyer, and it's the only side of the equation your customer cares about.
Ask what the result is worth to the person paying:
- Revenue created. If your work plausibly brings in $40,000 of new business, $4,000 is a rounding error to the buyer.
- Cost avoided. A process fix that saves 5 hours a week of a $90,000 employee's time saves roughly $11,000 a year.
- Risk removed. Compliance, security, tax and legal-adjacent work is priced against the size of the mistake, not the hours of the fix.
- Time bought back. For business owners, "you never have to think about this again" carries real money.
A common professional-services benchmark is charging somewhere in the range of 10–20% of the first-year value you create. If you can't estimate that value at all, that's a signal about the offer, not the price: you may be selling activity instead of an outcome.
Your workable range is between the floor and the ceiling. Pick a number in the lower-middle of it for your first three customers, then move up.
Step 3: Stop selling hours
Hourly billing is the default because it's easy, and it's a trap for exactly two reasons: it caps your income at your calendar, and it punishes you for getting better. Fix a bug in 30 minutes instead of 4 hours and hourly billing hands you a pay cut.
Price a defined outcome at a fixed price instead:
- Not "SEO consulting, $100/hour" but "Technical SEO audit and 90-day fix plan: $1,500, delivered in two weeks."
- Not "bookkeeping help" but "Monthly books closed and reconciled by the 10th, $450/month."
- Not "marketing advice" but "One paid-ads campaign built, launched and handed over: $2,000."
Fixed price forces you to define scope, which is the same discipline that makes an offer buyable. If you can't name the deliverable, the timeline and the price in one sentence, the pricing problem is downstream of an offer problem, and the free Nine2Founder idea check will usually show you which part is fuzzy.
Step 4: Read the reaction, not the number
Once you name a price to real buyers, the response is data. Three patterns cover almost everything:
They say yes immediately, with no questions. Your price is too low. Every time. Raise it 30–50% for the next prospect and watch what happens, a fast yes is the cheapest price signal you'll ever get.
They hesitate, ask what's included, then buy. You're in the right zone. Hesitation is normal at a correct price; it means the buyer is doing real math.
They go quiet or say "that's more than we expected." One of three things is true: the price is genuinely above the value, you didn't connect the price to an outcome, or you're talking to the wrong buyer. Note which objection you hear: "too expensive" from a buyer with no budget is a targeting problem, not a pricing problem.
The mistake is changing your price after one no. Test the same number with five prospects before you move it. One rejection is noise; four out of five is a pattern.
Nobody's price was ever validated by a spreadsheet. It's validated by the smallest number of strangers who will actually pay it.
Four pricing mistakes that cost real money
- Anchoring on competitors. Their price reflects their costs, reputation and buyer: none of which are yours. Use it as context, never as a rule.
- Discounting to close. A discount teaches the buyer your first number was fiction. Reduce scope instead: same rate, smaller deliverable.
- Charging what you'd be comfortable paying. You are not your customer. Your personal budget has nothing to do with a business buyer's.
- Pricing before validating demand. If nobody wants the outcome, no price is correct. Demand first, price second, always in that order.
What "founder pricing" is actually for
Your first one or two customers can legitimately get a lower number, but say why out loud: "This is founder pricing: it's $800 instead of $1,500 because you're my first client and I'm asking for a testimonial and a referral in exchange." That framing keeps your real price intact and turns a discount into an asset.
Cap it at two. A business that only sells at a discount hasn't proven it can sell.
If you'd rather test your price with a real market instead of a spreadsheet: offer development, ad creatives, a five-day live test and the pursuit of a first paying customer, ending in a clear BUILD / MODIFY / WALK AWAY call: that's exactly what the First Customer Validation is built to do. And if you're still earlier than that, start with the free idea check before you worry about the number at all.
Frequently asked questions
What should I charge for my very first client?
Pick a number in the lower-middle of the range between your salary-math floor and the value of the outcome: for most professional services, that's $500–$2,000 for a defined project. Name it clearly, don't apologize for it, and raise it after the third customer.
Should I put my prices on my website?
For a productized, fixed-scope offer, yes, public pricing filters out buyers who were never going to pay and saves you calls. For custom project work where scope varies widely, publish a starting-from figure ("projects start at $2,500") instead of a full price list.
Is it bad to raise prices on existing clients?
No, but do it with notice and a reason. Thirty days' warning, a short explanation, and the new rate applied to the next cycle is standard practice. Expect to lose a client or two: that's usually a portfolio upgrade, not a loss.
How do I know if I'm underpricing?
Three tells: everyone says yes without negotiating, you feel resentful during delivery, and the revenue doesn't survive the unbillable hours. Any one of those means raise the price on the next customer, not the current one.