The price you are afraid to say out loud is usually the right one

There is a number you say when a client asks what the project costs, and there is a number you think about afterwards, in the car. For most people who make things for a living, those two numbers are between thirty and sixty percent apart. This essay is about closing that gap, and about the fact that the gap is almost never an information problem.

I have run this exercise with eleven cohorts now. The pattern is consistent enough that I have stopped treating it as a coincidence: the price people are afraid to say out loud is usually within ten percent of the price the market would have paid without complaint.

The four questions

Before you change a single number, answer these in writing. Not in your head — in writing, where the weak answers are visible.

1. When did you last lose work on price alone, and did the client say so, or did you assume it?
2. What is the cheapest project you took in the last year, and what did it cost you in the projects you could not take because of it?
3. If your rate doubled tomorrow, which three clients would leave — and would you miss the work, or only the revenue?
4. What would you have to be able to say about the outcome to make the new number obvious rather than negotiable?

The fourth is the one that does the work. Underpricing is rarely a courage problem in isolation; it is a description problem wearing a courage problem's coat. When you cannot describe the outcome precisely, the only remaining axis of comparison is price, and you will lose on that axis to somebody with lower costs and less taste.

You are not competing on price. You are competing on how clearly you can describe what happens afterwards.

The strategy test

There is such a thing as deliberately pricing low. It is a strategy, and it has a shape: it is temporary, it is aimed at a specific asset you are trying to acquire — a portfolio piece, a testimonial, an introduction — and it has a written end date.

If your low price has no end date, it is not a strategy. It is a habit that formed while you were busy.

Write down the date. If you cannot bring yourself to write down a date, that is your answer, and it is worth more than another six months of deliberating.

A worked example

A member of The Bindery — a bookbinder, twelve years in — was charging $340 for an edition of twenty-five. He had raised it twice in a decade, both times by a rounding amount, both times after somebody else suggested it.

We did the arithmetic in public on a numbers night. Materials were $96. The work took him eleven hours across four days, because the glue has to cure. At $340 he was earning $22 an hour before tax, before the studio rent, before the four hours of email that every commission carries.

He raised it to $580. Two of nine repeat clients left. His revenue went up thirty-one percent in the following quarter and he took on three fewer editions, which gave him the first unstructured week he had had since 2019.

The script

The conversation is shorter than you think, and it is not a negotiation. Say the number, say what it buys, and stop talking. The silence after a price is the client doing arithmetic, not the client objecting.

• State the number first, not last. Burying it after three paragraphs of justification reads as an apology.
• Describe the outcome in the client's language, not your process in yours.
• Name what is not included, before they ask. It makes what is included feel deliberate.
• Give one alternative at a lower number with visibly less in it — never the same work for less money.
• Then stop. Do not fill the pause.

If they say yes immediately and without a flicker, your new number is still too low. That is uncomfortable information, and it is information.

What to do this week

Take your current rate card and add forty percent to one line — the service you are best at and least tired of. Quote it that way to the next three inquiries. Not to existing clients, not to everybody, and not permanently. Three inquiries.

Then write down what actually happened, rather than what you feared would happen. The distance between those two things is the entire subject of this newsletter.