Price Your Work for the Shit You’ll Actually Want to Do

Most service founders bankrupt themselves with a basic math error: when you price a service, you calculate how long the deliverable takes and bill for those hours // resources.

You count the time to:

Write the strategy
Build the site
Run the workshop
Edit the manuscript

Easy, right?

Sadly, no...

You completely ignore the “client tax”- the untracked // unanticipated hours you spend managing the human once the project starts.

It’s the kickoff call. The Slack pings. The “quick questions.” The extra round of revisions. The 30-minute therapy session because they got nervous about launch. The random bug fix three weeks after offboarding.

You never put those hours in the proposal.

But you still work them.

Do this across 10 or 20 clients and suddenly 40% of your week is gone.

The fix before you sell your next package:

Calculate your delivery cost.
Add a 30% buffer for “emotional and operational support.”
Look at the final margin.

If the numbers still work, scale it. If they don’t, raise your prices or productize the onboarding.

Step 1: Set your service price

Start with the price you want to charge. Base it on what the result is worth to the customer, what buyers in your market pay for similar work, and how many hours it takes to deliver.

To find the market price, look at what competitors publish, ask people who buy this kind of work what they paid last time, and check the rates in your own past proposals. You want a range, not a single figure. Pick a point in that range you can defend to a buyer.

Count delivery hours with care. Include everything you do to produce the work: research, drafts, your own review, the time you spend formatting and sending it. Leave out anything you do because the customer asked a question, needed reassurance, or wanted help using what you made.

You’ll count those hours in step two.

Now write down two numbers: the price and the delivery hours. Divide the price by the hours. You now know the hourly rate you think you’re charging.

That rate will probably look good. You chose the price so it would. Keep it in front of you; you’ll need it in step three.

But before you move on:

First, don’t lower the price because it makes you nervous. You’ll test the price properly in step three. If you cut it now, you’ll test a number you picked out of fear.
Second, buyers take your price as a description of who you serve. If you charge very little, you attract people who shop on price; those buyers often ask for the most help. Your cheapest customers can cost you the most hours. Keep that in mind when you pick the number.

Step 2: Include the time you’ll actually have to spend supporting every customer

Count as support every hour you spend on a customer outside the work itself. Write a list for your own service. You’ll probably include:

Onboarding. The kickoff call, asking for logins and files, explaining how you work.
Messages. Questions, approvals, small requests, “quick” calls.
Updates. Status emails and check-in meetings, including the ones customers ask for when they get anxious.
Extra changes. Revisions beyond the rounds you planned.
Explanation. Telling the customer, and often their boss, what you did and why.
Aftercare. Follow-up questions, small fixes, and help for team members who missed the first meeting.
Follow-up. Asking for late feedback, late approvals, and late payments.

Count real hours, not the hours you hope to spend. If you’ve sold this service before, go back through the email threads, calendars, and chat logs for your last three to five customers. Add up the time as honestly as you can. If you haven’t sold it yet, time every support task for your next customer, down to the two-minute replies.

Count the time you lose switching tasks. You might spend two minutes writing a reply and twenty minutes getting back into the work you left. Count all twenty-two.

Watch the favors. You’ll say yes to small extras to keep a customer happy: an edit to a slide outside the project, a call with their investor, a look at a competitor’s website. You’ll think each one is too small to bill. Add them up for a month, and you might find a full day.

Plan for your average customer, not your easiest one. Some customers send three emails across a whole project. Others message you every day. If you don’t know your average yet, use the busier end of your guess.

Watch the number of people on the customer’s side. One founder asks one set of questions. A team of five asks five sets, often in five different places. Someone on that team always asks you to explain the decision again.

Remember: decent (non-shit) customers pay you for a result; but they also want to know you got their message and that you’re on schedule. You’ll spend time on that whether you plan for it or not, so plan for it.

Add your support hours to your delivery hours. You now have the real number of hours you give each customer.

Step 3: Check whether the business still makes sense

Divide your price by the real number of hours. Compare the result with the rate from step one.

If the two rates are close, you priced well. Keep going.

If you now earn a third or half less per hour than you planned, you have work to do before you sell another one. Most people find a gap like this the first time they look.

Then check your week. Work out how many customers you can serve each month at the real hour count. Work out how much you earn from that many customers. Compare that with the income you want and the hours you want to work. Decide what kind of week you want first, then set your price and your offer so you earn enough inside that week.

If you don’t like what you see, you have five options.

Charge more. You now know what the work costs you in time, including the support. You can raise the price and explain the new number to yourself without guessing. Customers who value the result will often pay it. Some won’t. Many of the buyers who leave over price would have needed the most help.

Set limits on support. Pick one channel for messages and tell customers which one. Give a reply window, such as one business day. Cap the revision rounds. Book check-ins on a fixed schedule so customers don’t need to ask for them. Write an FAQ or record a short onboarding video so you answer the common questions once instead of twenty times. Customers usually accept rules you set at the start. They push back when you add rules halfway through a project.

Don’t cut support to zero. Customers judge you on how you treat them during the project as much as on the final work. Plan for good support and charge for it.

Sell support separately. Include a fixed amount of support in the base price and sell the rest as a monthly retainer or a support plan. Customers who want more of your time can buy it. Customers who don’t want it pay less.

Pick different customers. Some buyers need more help than others: first-time buyers of your kind of service, teams with no clear decision-maker, companies that hire you to fix something nobody on staff understands. Write your offer and your sales pages for the buyers who need less help, or charge the others more.

Change the offer. You can turn part of the service into something you build once: templates, a course, a fixed-scope package with a clear finish. You still serve customers. You answer fewer of the same questions.

If you try all five and still don’t earn enough, drop the service. People keep running services they should drop because they spent a year building them, told their friends about them, or feel embarrassed to quit. Keep the business only if you’d still choose it knowing the real hours. You lose less by stopping now than by finding out after another year of long weeks.

Do the check again

Your first pricing model is a complete lie.

Even if you try to bake in your “client support” hours upfront, you’ll guess wrong the first time.

You’ll overestimate a few things. You’ll wildly underestimate almost everything else.

That’s why you need a quarterly Support Audit.

For two weeks every quarter, ruthlessly track every single minute you spend managing clients outside of the actual deliverable. Then compare reality against your spreadsheet.

When you inevitably find a margin-killer, you only have three levers to pull:

Raise your prices to absorb the chaos
Productize and cut the support you include (move from 1-on-1 calls to async Loom videos)
Fire your current ICP and sell to higher-leverage customers who don’t need hand-holding

Run the math on paper before you sell; run it again once you have real customers and battle-tested data, and make running it second nature.

Until you know your true effective hourly rate, you’re flying blind.

Once you see the real number, you know exactly what to fix.

🍕 I’m JA Westenberg. I write essays about technology, philosophy, productivity, and what it means to be human. If you’re an optimist, you’re in the right place. You can read my AI disclosure here.

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