need based rates
Our service-based offerings are paid because they are a large commitment of our time and energy that require financial exchange for us to reach a state of enoughness in order to be sustainable and to be able to offset our free and lower-cost offerings.
Our rates will perhaps seem high or low depending on who you are, and we absolutely acknowledge that we’re all coming from different backgrounds and perspectives that inform how we orient around money and its relationship to service and value.
As part of our commitment to financial transparency, to help put our rates into perspective, and in case it’s useful as a framework to begin to think about your own rates, here’s how we got to the numbers you see on all of our service-based offerings.
Baseline Enough Number
The amount we each need for Rest Day to be our only financial source is our baseline enough number. All rates listed on the site use this baseline enough number as the foundation. To find this number, we calculated our monthly and annual budgets for each team member based on the expenses we need to cover both survival needs and what we each consider requirements for our lives.
The expenses we used to find this calculation are current expenses and also include what we consider necessary but are currently neglected expenses, as well as “luxuries” that we consider personal necessities. For example: getting car maintenance is a necessary baseline expense even if you’ve been ignoring it for two years (just us?), and even if it might be a luxury to someone else, you may consider regular bodywork as a baseline need.
Our expenses are based on the cost of living in major US cities (Los Angeles, Austin, and Portland), and account for individual life circumstances that include significant healthcare costs, student loan debt, and supporting a family.
Our baseline enough number per person is $6,000/mo, or an annual salary of $72,000.
Ideal Enough Number
We also calculated our ideal enough number, which is kind of like the pleasure-plus dream version of the baseline. Our ideal enough number is not factored into our current rates, but is worth mentioning as a point of comparison. While we may eventually use this number or closer to it to determine rates in the future, in the meantime we want to prioritize the greater financial accessibility that the baseline number offers, and to gauge how our relationship to having enough of what we need changes as we use our work to make space for other resources like time and rest.
To find this number, we calculated budgets based on projected expenses for each team member if we made more room for pleasure and financial goals (for example, getting to be a significant financial backer to buy land and build cooperative housing with friends or paying off financial debt early.)
Our ideal enough number per person is $10,000/mo, or an annual salary of $120,000.
2024 data from SmartAsset using the MIT Wage Calculator states that on average a single individual needs $96,500 pre-tax salary per year to live sustainably comfortably in a major US city. In our cities, that average is $100,000-110,000. We’re not necessarily interested in consuming or spending like the average American, so we’re in continual dialogue with ourselves around making sure we have enough for ourselves, how we’re spending the money we have, and staying connected with our values for mindful consuming. What we do know is that money that comes into our hands is not just going to stay there, so if we can be financial resources for our loved ones and our communities, we want that.
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Because our financial model includes universal wages (equal pay), we wanted to make sure that we base our overall income goals on the baseline enough number of the person who has the most financial need. That way, when income is divided between the three of us, the person with the most need will still be able to meet those needs.
As it turns out, the baseline enough number is almost the same for all of us, so no one will be making significantly more than they calculated they need for themselves, but because income needs can vary over time, any one of us who receives income in excess of their own need can use the additional money to fund additional pleasure, support for loved ones, or direct mutual aid outside of the business.
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We don’t love having time directly connected to income because hourly wages don’t necessarily account for all kinds of human circumstances and neurodiverse ways of approaching work, but for the sake of calculations, it is a useful starting point. We calculated our hourly rate based on what we need to pay everyone on our team a salary that meets our baseline needs, along with how much we are willing and able to work due to capacity, human inevitability, and schedule.
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From our hourly rate, we then looked at historical data of how much time it typically takes us to do certain projects, and we multiplied the hourly rate by the number of hours, which got us to our standard rate for offerings. We also factor in a buffer to projects, because past experience has taught us that despite our best mathing, we have a tendency to give more than we initially estimate, and this saves us from accidentally over-working ourselves.
The rate you see on the site is the hourly rate from these calculations, rounded to the next “nice” number (so it’s not like $1283 but instead $1200 or $1000).
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In order to find the numbers for our sliding scale, the standard project rate is discounted around 20-30% for our community rate to acknowledge varying access to financial means based on marginalized identities and systemic factors, and this community rate is supplemented by a 20-30% addition to create the pay-it-forward rate.
While it would be lovely to have the exact percentage across the board, the amount that is discounted or supplemented does vary based on the project. For example, a 20% discount on the Sustain Work Intensive would make the community rate $1200, but for this particular offering we lowered the community rate more to $1000 in order to create further accessibility around an offering that we consider foundational.
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We’ve found that pricing offerings does not work on math alone. Basing income on needs offers a foundation that allows us each to get real with what enoughness means and to counter narratives around more growth always meaning better. It’s very helpful to use as a measuring stick against perpetuating dynamics that extract more from us as workers than we have to give or exploit the people, however unintentionally, who we’re trying to give to.
That said, money is tied to numbers, but it’s not just about math. We all have our own relationships to financial exchange, and all kinds of exchange (money and not) are about relationship. So that’s why we don’t charge to the exact dollar that we have on our spreadsheet calculations and why our money-mathing has some intuition too. Part of making space for what’s human is not treating the humans buying and selling like numbers too.
Want to do some rate finding of your own?
Rest easy with Restful Rates 101, our free 5-day email course.
Considerations for rate finding that keeps economic justice in mind along the way
Using needs as a starting point for income calculations to keep exploitation and burnout at bay
Overcoming the self-exploitation of underearning
Specific strategies for countering the extraction of overcharging
Hourly Rate Finder: calculating an hourly rate that can provide a baseline for pricing your services that you feel like you can stand behind
A foundation of emotional reflection to meet fears, stories, and cultural expectations around earning and number-finding
Where The Dollars Go
Now that you know how we determine our rates (and maybe have decided to revisit your own), you might also be wondering what happens when those numbers hit our bank accounts. Here’s a quick overview of our cashflow.
Percentage Breakdown
At Rest Day, we use the Profit First method for accounting (with a few significant shifts). The general premise is that all revenue after fees and contractor payments that comes into our business is divided into percentages that are allotted to accounts for specific purposes.
We considered using a local credit union for our bank, but as a remote team across the country, the local nature complicated our ability for everyone to easily access. Currently, we use a bank for our cashflow called RelayFi (not an affiliate link) that is specifically set up to support the Profit First method and works particularly well for long-distance teams like ours. Our dollars are decentralized and located in a variety of program banks across various local communities, which we cross-referenced for values through MightyDeposits and determined a significant portion are B-Corps, are minority-owned, and invest in small business and community financing.
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We pay our salaries from this account as “owner draws.” This account holds excess money when our income goals exceed our needs to pay us a more predictable amount for months with less money coming in.
Universal wages mean we each receive 1/3 of the amount in the account until we reach our “enough” number to be fully supported by Rest Day.
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We set aside a percentage in this account for the quarterly and annual taxes that we each individually pay as members of an LLC.
Excess funds remaining after annual federal taxes go back into our business to help us each reach a consistent living wage, and then expand our benefits plan and build our community initiatives.
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Payment account for business expenses like software and subscriptions, technology, technical and legal support.
As a digital business without a brick-and-mortar location, our operating expenses beyond benefits are not high, so excess funds get reassessed at the end of each year to determine how we can expand our benefits and our capacity for giving and service.
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No matter how much money is coming in, part of our revenue is always going back into organizations, causes, and mutual aid opportunities — both as a commitment to local and global community care happening when we are resourced together, and to acknowledge the need for redistribution of wealth and reparations for systemic harms that our own privilege is and has been complicit in.
We continually revisit the amount we’re able to contribute, and the percentage will only ever get higher.
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In the general Profit First model, half of this amount would be paid out to each of us as a quarterly bonus and the other half would remain in the account to accrue as an emergency fund for the business.
In our case, this profit is specifically set aside to go back into the business to supplement our wages until they reach our “enough” number, and eventually allow us to fund both our paid benefits like subsidized healthcare and our paid community initiatives like the community growth stipend to support our loved ones and local communities.