Ask ten online coaches how they arrived at their monthly price and nine will describe the same method: they looked at what coaches like them were charging, positioned themselves slightly under it, and have adjusted upward once since. It is not a bad starting point. It is a terrible steady state, because it prices the market and not your capacity.
Start from the number that actually binds
You are not selling hours and you are not selling plans. You are selling a slot on a roster whose size is fixed by how much attention each client needs. So the arithmetic that matters is: how many clients can you hold at the quality you want to be known for, and what do you need each slot to earn?
Work it in that order. A coach who can genuinely hold thirty clients and needs the business to produce a given income has a price, not a preference. If that price is above what your market pays, the problem is the roster size or the offer, and no amount of positioning fixes it.
The cost nobody counts
The hour that writes the plan is the hour everybody counts. The hours that decide whether the roster is profitable are the other ones: the check-in that turns into a forty-minute conversation, the plan rewritten because somebody is travelling, the four messages about a substitution, the chasing of a payment that failed silently.
Time those for two weeks — genuinely, with a timer — and most coaches find the admin around a client is between a third and a half of the total time that client costs them. Price set against the writing time alone is a price set against half the work.
Three models, and what each one really trades
- Monthly, open-ended. Easiest to sell, worst for planning: everybody can leave in thirty days, so your revenue is a rolling guess and your quiet January is somebody else’s problem to explain.
- Blocks of twelve or sixteen weeks. Matches how training actually works, gives you a renewal conversation on a date, and asks for a bigger yes up front.
- Hybrid — a block to start, monthly after. The block establishes the standard, the monthly keeps the door open, and the renewal conversation still exists because the block ends on a day.
There is no universally right answer here, but there is a wrong one: monthly, open-ended, with no scheduled renewal conversation. That combination means nobody ever formally decides to continue, so nobody formally decides anything until they decide to leave.
Tiers, if you must have them
Tiers work when they sell different amounts of *your attention*, and fail when they sell different amounts of content. A tier that adds a video library adds nothing a client values at renewal. A tier that adds a call a fortnight is legible, costly to you in a way you can measure, and easy for a client to decide about.
Raising a price without losing the room
- Raise for new clients first, and live with the gap for a block. Nothing convinces you the new price is fine like three people paying it.
- Give existing clients a date, not a surprise — one block’s notice is the minimum that feels fair.
- Say what changes, honestly. If nothing changes, say that too: costs rose and the price had not moved in two years is a reason adults accept.
- Do not offer to hold the old price for anyone who pushes back, unless you intend to hold it for everyone who did not.
What software has to do with any of this
Honestly: less than the people selling it suggest. Software cannot tell you what your coaching is worth. What it can do is take the admin third of the client cost down far enough that the roster you can hold gets bigger at the same quality — which is the only lever in this article that changes the arithmetic rather than the price.
And it can make the renewal conversation happen on the day it should, which is the single most reliably forgotten step in a coaching business.