When the rates you charge are rooted in reality, you can rest easy.

With reality-based rates, you’ll know that you’re on your way to having your true needs covered, getting your bills paid, and that you’re not underpaying or over-exploiting yourself or your team.

You’ll be able to stand by the prices of your offerings because they’re based on actual numbers that support you and your work.

And when you put your rates through a lens of meeting the true realities of your clients and customers, you can rest easy knowing that you’re operating toward a community-based exchange that benefits everyone involved.

Okay, but how do you get there?

It takes one part math, one part intuition, and one part equitable thinking to put yourself in a place where you can figure out the real numbers that need to go into your pricing in a way that can fund your life and still be in right relationship with the people you provide your work to.

Because it’s easy to get into the weeds of pricing, we created this free 5-day email course to help you work through your offerings from the perspective of what you need and how to attach those needs more closely to numbers that can end up in your bank account.

AGENDA

  • 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 and 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 (even if you don’t do hourly service work, this number can be a helpful basis for scalable offerings too!)

  • A foundation of emotional reflection to meet fears, stories, and cultural expectations around earning and number-finding

Over five days, we'll dive into:

Lessons

01 MORE ENOUGHNESS, LESS EXPLOITATION

02 WHAT YOU NEED, NOT “YOUR WORTH”

03 OVERCOMING UNDEREARNING, UNLEARNING OVERCHARGING

04 CALCULATE YOUR NEED-BASED RATE

05 CHECK-IN WITH YOUR INSIGHTS AND YOUR INSIDES

because we’re all about transparency here…

At the end of our time in Restful Rates 101, we also have an opportunity to dig in a bit further if you want to take your hourly rate number and put it into the greater context of your offerings.

This sequel of sorts includes:

  • Project Fee Estimator: a formula for pricing service offerings plus a play space to think through pricing scalable offerings based on number of sales

  • How to price service-based and scalable offerings with latitude to make room for any surprises

  • Some ways to price scalable offerings, with different (systemically minded) pricing factors to consider

  • Ideal Offerings Mix Math: a spreadsheet to use for projecting and planning an ideal balance of time and revenue for your business

  • Restful Rates Dashboard: a Notion dashboard that has all of the lessons and resources from both Restful Rates 101 and 201 for safekeeping, plus worksheets to fill out questions as you go

  • Money Dates and Financial Frolicking playlists: two cute Spotify playlists to help you focus while you math your math, and then to celebrate when you’re done!

Question?
Answered.

  • The short answer is that the hourly rate is a starting place (not a destination), but it is a potentially important one!

    Even though scalable offerings have more factors to consider than hourly, service-based ones, you’re still working with many of the same variables from your reality to get there, like your need-based budget, your time, and your overall capacity to set up and deliver the work. Using those as a foundation to find an hourly rate based on need and ability, and then using that rate to price scalable offerings can help you think through how many sales you’d need to make for an offering without overworking yourself and provide high-low guide rails for your potential price to keep from under- or over-charging.

    Taking time upfront to align on what will be required for creation, promotion, and a light understanding of how much you need to sell can keep your work on the project right-sized with less second-guessing.

    We do a good deal of playing with pricing for scalable offerings in the follow-up course, Restful Rates 201, including learning how many sales needed to break even on creation, and these calculations start with the Hourly Rate Finder spreadsheet.

  • Building more equitable structures and processes never happens in isolation, and we're so grateful to have amazing anticapitalist and anti-oppression educators and peers to look to along the way and learn from. There are many educational sources, but two great ones to start with related to rate-setting and personal enoughness include FREELY: An Anti-Capitalist Guide to Pricing Your Work by Bear Hebert and How Much Money is Enough? by Nic Antoinette. Learn more about economic justice and financial accessibility in our resource hub, find more educators and folks to work with in our community referral network, and for more from us, check in with our commitment to financial accessibility and transparency.