Every appointment trade asks the same pricing question wearing different clothes. The groomer asks what a doodle in full coat should cost; the detailer asks how to quote neglected paint; the stylist asks whether the color correction is priced underwater; the consultant asks what an hour of advice is worth. Underneath, it is one question — what must my time earn, and what will my market bear? — and it has a working method: four moves, in order. This guide is the method, worked twice in two structurally different trades so you can see which parts are the method and which parts are the trade.
The trade-specific guides are the same four moves worn by a particular business: pricing ceramic coating, pricing dog grooming, and whether to charge for a discovery call, which is the version of this question consultants meet first.
Move one: find your floor — what an hour must earn
Skip the market for a moment; the market cannot tell you your costs. Add up a real month: rent or chair fee, insurance, product, software and card fees, equipment wearing out, and — the line everyone forgets to write down — the wage you intend to pay yourself. Suppose, for a worked example (every number in it is illustrative; the method is the point): $1,200 rent, $90 insurance, $350 product, $160 software and processing, and a $3,600 target wage. That month must earn $5,400.
Now the honest hours. A 40-hour week is not 40 billable hours: there is cleanup, admin, the gap the 2 p.m. cancellation left, the quiet Tuesday morning. Suppose the honest count is 25 booked hours a week — call it 108 a month. The floor is $5,400 divided by 108: $50 an hour. Every service on the menu now has a minimum, and in this example a 90-minute job priced below $75 is losing money before it starts, whatever the shop across the road charges.
Two things about the floor. It is arithmetic, not strategy — no national average is needed, only your own bills and an honest diary. And it moves: hire someone, change premises, or book fuller weeks, and the floor moves with you. Recompute it twice a year.
The software and card-fee line is the one people guess at, and it is also the one that jumps without warning when you hire. We priced eighteen vendors at exactly that moment in what-booking-software-costs-when-you-hire-your-second-person; put your real figure in the floor rather than a remembered one.
Move two: read the market like a customer
Mystery-shop three local competitors and one operator you aspire to be. Book nothing; just walk their booking pages and menus the way a customer would, and write down what the same service costs at each. You now have a band, and the band is all the market can tell you — it does not tell you where in it you belong. Below the band, you are advertising cheapness whether you mean to or not. At the top, you are making a promise the rest of the experience has to keep.
If your floor from move one sits above the local band, that is information too: either your costs are wrong for your market, or your market read is aimed at the wrong competitors — the ones you are leaving behind.
Move three: position, then price the position
Two businesses can charge different prices for the same hour and both be right, because the customer is not buying an hour — they are buying an outcome, a risk removed, and an experience. The signals that let a price sit high in the band are boringly consistent across trades: visible specialization (the detailer who only does correction, the groomer known for doodles), condition-based quoting that shows expertise before the sale, a portfolio and reviews that carry the claim, and an experience around the appointment that matches the number.
Value pricing is just positioning with the courage of its arithmetic. It fails one way: a top-of-band price on a middle-of-band experience. Customers forgive a high price; they do not forgive a high price that lied.
Move four: charge for the job, not the slot
The most common pricing failure in appointment work is not the rate — it is the menu pricing the average job while customers bring the hard one. The matted coat books as "full groom." The neglected paint books as "ceramic coating." The two-hour color correction books as "color." Every one of those is a discount you never agreed to give, and it is the leak that quietly undoes the first three moves.
The fix is structural: tiers or add-ons that price condition, stated at booking rather than sprung at the counter. This is exactly where the per-trade guides earn their keep — tiers by paint condition and a size-by-coat matrix with a matting policy are the same move made in two different rooms.
The same four moves in a van, where the unit is not an hour
The example above is a premises trade: a room, a chair, and a diary measured in hours. Run the method in a business built the other way and you can see which parts were the method. Take a one-van mobile valeting round — and the arithmetic below applies without change to mobile grooming, on-site repair, in-home massage, or any trade where the work travels to the customer.
The floor, per visit rather than per hour. A real month, illustrative again: $780 van finance and fuel, $210 for vehicle and public liability insurance, $240 in consumables, $150 for software, card fees and the phone, and a $3,800 target wage. That is $5,180 the month must earn.
Now the honest capacity, and here is where the two trades separate. You cannot count billable hours, because a large part of the working day is spent driving and none of it is billable. What you can count is visits. Four jobs a day is the honest number once loading, driving and pack-down are in it; five days a week is twenty; and weather, a customer who is not in, and the job that overran take out roughly a day a fortnight. Call it 74 visits a month, once that fortnightly lost day and a couple of weeks off a year are both in the figure. The floor is $5,180 divided by 74: $70 a visit.
That number says something a per-hour floor cannot. A quick $55 mini-valet is below the floor however fast you work, because the van still drove there — the cost that broke it was the journey, not the labour. And the reverse holds: an $80 job that takes twenty minutes longer than planned is still above the floor, so the instinct to rush it is wrong.
Move two, unchanged. Look up what three local rounds charge for the same package. The band exists here exactly as it does on a high street; it is just published on Facebook pages rather than menus.
Move three, unchanged in shape and different in content. What lifts a mobile round up its band is rarely the finish — it is reliability, because the customer is buying an appointment at their own house. A guaranteed two-hour window, a message when you set off, and a van that arrives when it said it would are worth more per visit than another stage of polish, and they cost less to provide.
Move four, and the trap is bigger here. The neglected estate car with a dog in the back books as the same "full valet" as the two-year-old hatchback. On a premises the overrun costs you an hour; on a round it costs you the fourth job of the day, which is the whole floor for that visit. Condition tiers and a stated add-on for pet hair are not fussiness, they are the difference between four jobs and three.
And one lever the premises trade does not have: the route. Density is a pricing input. If clustering a day's work into one area lets you fit a fifth job, the floor per visit falls from $70 to about $56, and that is a bigger move than any price rise you were nervously considering. The way to buy density is on the menu rather than in the diary: a minimum spend for jobs outside your main area, or a stated travel band as an add-on the customer chooses at booking, so the outlying job either pays for itself or does not happen.
Notice what changed between the two examples and what did not. Every move is the same move. Only the unit changed — hours in a room, visits in a van — and the unit is chosen by whatever your day actually runs out of. A consultant runs the identical arithmetic on billable days, and gets a shock, because the honest number of billable days in a year is far below the number of working days once selling, writing and admin are counted.
Pricing something new, with no market to read
Move two assumes a band exists. Sometimes there is nothing to read: a service nobody local offers, a package you invented, a treatment new enough that the three shops you would mystery-shop do not sell it. The temptation is to guess low, and guessing low is the expensive mistake, because a launch price is an anchor you then have to fight.
Three things stand in for the missing market read.
The substitute. Nobody buys in a vacuum. Find what your customer would otherwise have done — the treatment they would have booked instead, the two appointments this one replaces, the problem they would have lived with — and price against that, because that is the comparison happening in their head whether or not you make it.
Your floor, which always exists. Move one does not need a market at all. It gives you a number below which the new service is a hobby, and it is often enough on its own to rule out the price you were about to pick.
What it displaces on your own diary. This is the one people forget. A new two-hour service does not need to clear your floor; it needs to beat what those two hours already earn. If your existing menu returns $60 an hour on a full day, a new service at your $50 floor is a $20 mistake every time it books, and it will feel like growth while it happens.
Then launch it as a run rather than a price. Say plainly that the introductory number applies to the first ten bookings, or until a stated date, and put the review date in your own calendar at the same moment. A temporary price with no end date is a permanent price, and the raise afterwards is a fight with exactly the customers who told their friends about it.
Sell it to your existing book first, before it goes on the public menu. Those clients are the only market you can read cheaply: what you learn is not whether they like the idea, which everyone says yes to, but whether they book it at the number. Count the people who ask the price and do not book, because that is the only signal that tells you the number is wrong rather than the offer, and it is invisible unless you decide to notice it.
Charging more when demand is higher
The Saturday morning slot is worth more than Tuesday at ten, and every operator knows it. Whether to price that difference is a question about your customers rather than your spreadsheet, and it has one test: could you say the rule out loud to a client in a single sentence, and would they nod? "Saturdays are five dollars more" passes. "The price depends on demand" does not, and a client who feels priced by an algorithm rebooks somewhere else.
Two versions work in appointment trades, and one reliably does not.
The off-peak discount works best, and it is the same arithmetic with the sign reversed. A lower price for the slots you struggle to fill reads as generosity; the identical gap expressed as a peak surcharge reads as a penalty. Customers have been taught to resent surge pricing by industries that did it badly, and there is no reason to inherit that argument when a quiet-hours rate moves the same people to the same slots.
A premium on the genuinely scarce also works, provided it is visible as a thing rather than a multiplier: the senior person's rate, the after-work appointment, the Saturday tier. Price it as its own line on the menu, so the customer chooses it knowing what it costs, rather than discovering it applied to them.
Prices that move while the customer is watching do not work. In a trade where people rebook the same slot every six weeks, a number that changed between visits reads as a bait, and the conversation happens at the counter with someone holding a card. Whatever you gain in yield you lose in the two minutes it takes to explain.
And be honest with yourself about which one you are doing. If the Saturday premium moves nobody to Tuesday, it is not demand pricing — it is a price rise on your busiest day wearing a costume. That may be entirely correct, but then do it properly: raise the whole menu and skip the theatre.
Where the software has to help is in showing the customer the rule at the right moment. In VoltsBook this is a conditional pricing rule: a percentage or a fixed amount added or discounted on chosen days of the week, or before or after a chosen time, evaluated in your business's own timezone so a weekend rule means your weekend. The customer sees it as its own line on the booking summary before they confirm, which is the mechanical version of the say-it-out-loud test — a surcharge nobody is shown is a surcharge you will be arguing about.
Tax, and what it changes about the menu
Your jurisdiction sets the rate; you do not get a decision there. What you do decide is whether the number on your menu is the number the customer pays — and that decision belongs to pricing, not to bookkeeping.
Tax-inclusive means the published price already contains the tax, so a customer sees one number from the menu through to the card. Tax-exclusive means the price is net and the tax is added at the end. Both are legitimate; they suit different customers.
For consumer trades, publish inclusive. Someone booking a haircut, a groom or a valet expects the number they read to be the number they pay, and a tax appearing at the last step is one of the most reliable ways to lose a booking that was already won. For business customers who reclaim the tax, exclusive is normal and often expected, because they think in net figures and an inclusive price makes them do arithmetic to compare you.
The arithmetic trap is worth stating plainly, because it catches people exactly once and it is expensive. Switching a menu from exclusive to inclusive without changing the numbers is a price cut of the whole tax fraction. At a twenty per cent rate, a service published at $100 plus tax was earning you $100; published at $100 including tax it earns you $83.33. This is the arithmetic that ambushes a business crossing a registration threshold: the day you must start charging tax, the same menu returns less unless you re-price it, and the temptation is to absorb the difference quietly and call it goodwill until the quarter's figures arrive.
A few things that are true in our own product, since the mechanics decide what you can put on a menu. Tax rules are named rules with a rate, not a field on the service, and each one is marked inclusive or added — so a business can publish an inclusive headline rate and still add a separate local levy on top. Rules never compound: two taxes both compute on the same base rather than one taxing the other. A rule can be scoped to particular services, which is how a zero-rated or reduced-rate item lives on the same menu as everything else, and to particular locations. Extras and retail products sit in the same taxable basket as the service they were sold with.
Two consequences worth designing your menu around. First, deposits are calculated on the tax-inclusive total, so a half deposit on a taxed booking collects half the tax with it — set the deposit knowing that, rather than discovering it. Second, and this is our own limitation rather than a feature: with an inclusive rate the price on the service menu is exactly what the customer pays, but with an exclusive rate the menu shows the net figure and the tax only appears once a time is chosen and the booking is priced. There is no automatic "prices exclude tax" note on the menu. If you publish exclusive prices to consumers, write that into the service description yourself — the software will not do it for you.
Packages: sell commitment, price it honestly
A package of ten sold upfront trades a discount for commitment and cash flow. Price the trade like it is real: the discount should be about what the commitment is worth to your diary — filled slow slots, predictable rebooking — not a round number that felt generous in the moment. And track the drawdown properly; a package in a spreadsheet beside a calendar is two sources of truth that will eventually disagree, and they will disagree in the client's favor.
The other half of a package is what happens when a session is missed, which is a pricing decision people make by accident. A block that quietly refunds a no-show session is a block with no commitment in it, and the discount you gave was for the commitment — the trainer's version of that clause is the clearest worked example, because trainers meet it every week.
Consultants meet the same question earlier than anyone: whether the first session is free is itself a pricing decision, and we gave it its own guide.
Raising prices without drama
The signal that you are underpriced is rarely a feeling; it is a full book. Weeks-long waits and a waiting list mean the market has voted at your current number. When that is the state, raise — and raise like a business, not like an apology: announce plainly with notice ("from 1 October, X costs Y"), skip the essay about your costs, and consider grandfathering regulars for one cycle if it buys you the nerve — one cycle, not forever. Small and predictable beats rare and dramatic; an annual pass across the whole menu keeps every individual increase boring.
And raise asymmetrically. The service that is always booked out is the one carrying information: it goes up first and furthest.
The price includes getting paid
A price list without money at booking is a suggestion. Deposits protect the number you just set: they filter no-shows at the moment they cost nothing, and they make condition-based quotes feel agreed rather than sprung. The mechanics — how much, when, and what to say — are in what a deposit actually does, which vendors can take one at all is checked in booking-software-with-deposits, and the wider machine of reminders, policy wording and waitlists is the no-show playbook.
How do I know my prices are too low?
A full book is the loudest signal — weeks-long waits, a waiting list, and hard jobs booking at average-job prices. If all three are true, the market has already voted for a raise.
How often should I raise prices?
Recompute your floor twice a year and pass the menu once a year. Small, predictable, announced increases beat rare dramatic ones — for your nerve and for the client's.
Should I publish my prices?
Publish the structure: from-prices, tiers, and what moves a job between them. Quote-on-inspection is right for condition work, but a page with no numbers at all reads as "expensive and evasive," which is only half the impression you want.
How do I price a service I have never sold before?
Price it against the substitute your customer would otherwise have bought, check it clears your cost floor, and then check it beats what those hours already earn on your existing menu — that last test is the one people skip. Launch it as an introductory run with a stated end (ten bookings, or a date), and sell it to your existing clients before it reaches the public menu.
Should I charge more for weekends and evenings?
Only if you can say the rule to a client in one sentence and they would nod. In practice the off-peak discount outperforms the peak surcharge — the same gap, read as generosity rather than a penalty — and a premium slot works best when it is a visible tier on the menu rather than a multiplier applied to someone at the payment step.
Should my published prices include tax?
Include it for consumers, who expect the number on the menu to be the number on the card. Exclude it for business customers, who think in net and reclaim it. Whichever you choose, be consistent across the menu, the confirmation and the invoice — and remember that moving from exclusive to inclusive without changing the numbers is a real price cut of the whole tax fraction.