Under-pricing feels safe. It is not.
When you under-price, you attract clients who cannot afford to work with the kind of business you are building. You do more work for less money, get more resentful, and burn out before you ever hit the revenue that would have let you hire help.
The three errors
- Pricing to a mythical "market rate." There is no single market rate for what you do. There are ten market rates, and you pick which one you are in by how you position.
- Pricing at the low end so nobody objects. If nobody ever objects, you are pricing wrong. A healthy price gets some no's.
- Pricing hourly when the outcome is the product. Hourly caps your income at your calendar. Package pricing does not.
How to price a package
Start with the outcome. What does the client walk away with? Then decide what that outcome is worth to them, not what your time was worth to produce it. Then set a price that comfortably includes the messy first delivery, the revisions, and your profit.
If that price scares you, you are close to the right one.
The Cavor.iq artifact for this
Module 13 gives you the Service Package and Pricing Guide, a fillable document that walks you through a three-tier package structure with defensible pricing and clean deliverable definitions.