The Service Pricing Guide
Work out the floor you cannot go below, then package it so a $500 job never turns into thirty hours of work.
Published Aug 28, 2026
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You will finish this with three numbers you can defend: the hourly cost you cannot go below, a floor price for your most common job, and a written scope that ends the job on time. It takes about two hours of spreadsheet work and one afternoon of writing. The output is a price list you can say out loud without flinching, and a definition of "done" that stops a $500 job from eating thirty hours.
1. Count your real billable hours first
Most underpricing starts here, not at the price. You do not bill 40 hours a week. You bill the hours you spend on client work, and the rest goes to sales calls, invoicing, email, marketing, admin, and fixing your own website.
Open a spreadsheet. Write down:
That is where the free part ends.
The rest walks the whole thing through, step by step — including the parts people get wrong and what to do when the normal route fails.