Most coaches do not have a pricing problem. They have a maths problem they have never sat down and done, and a pricing structure inherited from in-person training that does not survive the move online.
The inherited structure is the hour. In a gym, an hour is a real unit — you were in the room for sixty minutes and the client paid for those sixty minutes. Online, the hour is fiction. You spend forty minutes writing a block that the client trains for six weeks, then eight minutes a week on a check-in. If you price that by the hour you will either charge so little that a full roster does not pay your rent, or you will find yourself inventing calls nobody wanted so the invoice looks justified.
This covers how to work out what you need to charge, how to structure packages that clients understand, and when to change the number.
Start with the maths, not the market
Every pricing article tells you to research what other coaches charge. Do that second. Do this first, because it is the only calculation that tells you whether your business works.
Three numbers:
1. What you need to earn. Not what you would like to earn — what the year has to produce for this to be your job. Say $90,000 before tax.
2. What it costs to run. Coaching software, insurance, your certification renewals, an accountant, phone and internet, a course or two. For most independent online coaches this lands between $4,000 and $6,000 a year — the line-by-line version is in what it really costs to run an online coaching business. Call it $5,000.
3. How many clients you can actually hold. Not how many you could technically have logins for. How many you can coach at the standard you want to be known for. For full-service online coaching — individual programming, weekly check-ins, nutrition, messaging — that is usually somewhere between 30 and 45 — see how many clients an online coach can handle for what breaks first. Say 35.
Now divide:
($90,000 + $5,000) ÷ 12 months = $7,917 per month in revenue
$7,917 ÷ 35 clients = $226 per client per month
That is your floor. Not your price — your floor, at a full roster, with nobody churning.
Because clients do churn, and rosters are not full year-round. Build in the slack: if you assume 80% occupancy across the year, the same target needs $283 per client per month. If your instinct was to charge $150, the maths has just told you that you would need 53 clients to hit $90,000, which is more than you can coach properly, which means you would deliver a worse service, which means more of them leave. That is the whole trap, and it closes before you have signed anyone.
Now go and look at what other coaches charge — as a sanity check on the number you calculated, not as a substitute for calculating it.
Price the outcome, not the delivery
Clients do not buy programming. They buy the state of being someone who trains consistently and knows what they are doing, and they buy not having to work it out alone.
This is not a semantic trick — it changes what goes on the sales page. A package described as "12 individualised workouts per month, weekly check-in, macro targets, unlimited messaging" is a list of your costs. A package described as "get strong enough to do this without me in six months" is the thing they want. The deliverables still belong on the page, underneath, because people want to know what they are getting. They just should not be the headline.
The practical consequence for pricing: when you sell deliverables, every conversation becomes a comparison of deliverable counts, and there is always someone offering more of them for less. When you sell an outcome, the comparison is between coaches, which is the comparison you can win.
The three ways to price, and what each does to you
Cost-plus is the calculation above. Work out your costs and capacity, add the margin you need, that is the price. It is the right way to find your floor and the wrong way to find your ceiling, because it prices your business rather than the client's result.
Market-rate is charging what comparable coaches charge. It is fast, it is safe, and it caps you at average forever. Useful when you genuinely do not know where you sit; a trap if you stay there.
Value-based is pricing against what the outcome is worth to that client. A client who has spent four years and several thousand dollars failing to get consistent is not comparing you against another coach's monthly rate. They are comparing you against another four years.
The version that works in practice is all three: cost-plus sets the floor, market-rate tells you where the middle of the market is, and value-based decides how far above that middle you sit and what you have to prove to sit there.
Build three tiers
One price forces every prospect into a yes-or-no. Three prices turn the question into which one, which is a much easier question to answer with money.
Three is the number. Two reads as a trick, and five is a decision nobody wants to make.
| Foundation | Core | Premium | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly | $180 | $320 | $600 |
| Programming | Template block, adjusted | Fully individual | Fully individual |
| Check-ins | Monthly | Weekly | Weekly + mid-week |
| Nutrition | Targets only | Targets + meal plan | Full nutrition coaching |
| Messaging | Group | Direct, 24h reply | Direct, same-day reply |
| Calls | — | — | Monthly video call |
| Capacity | 60+ | 35 | 8 |
Each tier has a job.
Foundation is the accessible one. It exists so that "too expensive" turns into "start here" and so the middle tier has something to look reasonable against. It has to be genuinely good — a bad cheap tier costs you referrals — but it must be visibly less than the middle one, and the way you make it less is by removing your time, not by removing quality.
Core is the one you want people on. Price it, build it and describe it as the default. Most of your roster should be here, and your capacity number should be calculated on this tier.
Premium is the anchor. It makes Core look sensible, and roughly one client in ten will take it — often the ones who would have paid it anyway and were waiting for you to offer it. Cap it low and honour the cap, because the reason it costs triple is that it costs you time you do not have much of.
The mistake to avoid: making the tiers differ only in how much of you they get. If Foundation is "the same thing but I reply slower", you are selling neglect at a discount. Tiers should differ in what the client gets, and the cheaper ones should lean on things that scale — group programming, a shared community, self-serve resources — rather than on you being worse at your job.
Sell recurring, not blocks
A 12-week block is a decision the client makes, completes, and then makes again from scratch — except the second time they have already got some of what they came for, and the urgency has gone.
A monthly subscription is a decision they make once and then decline to reverse. That difference compounds:
| Recurring monthly | 12-week blocks | |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue | Predictable | Lumpy, seasonal |
| Renewal | Automatic unless cancelled | A fresh sale every quarter |
| Client mindset | Ongoing process | Fixed-term project |
| Your admin | One setup | Chasing renewals |
| Cash | Even | Front-loaded, then dry |
The objection is that clients prefer to buy a finite thing. Some do. That is what a minimum commitment is for: three months minimum, then rolling monthly. The client gets a defined start and a defined obligation, you get a floor under every signup, and neither of you has to have the renewal conversation four times a year.
The other reason recurring wins is that fat-loss and strength timelines do not fit in twelve weeks, and a business model that ends at week twelve trains clients to think the process does too.
If you want the billing to run without you chasing it, that is what a platform's payments and packages are for — recurring charges, minimum commitments and failed-payment retries handled automatically rather than by you sending reminder texts.
What to do about discounts
Mostly: do not.
A discount to close a hesitant prospect teaches that prospect that your price is negotiable, and they will remember that at every renewal. It also, quietly, tells them the original number was made up.
Three exceptions worth making:
- Paid-in-full. 10% off three or six months paid upfront is fair — you are being paid for certainty and cash flow, and the client is genuinely taking on risk.
- Founding clients. When you launch something new, an explicitly time-boxed founding rate in exchange for testimonials and feedback is honest. Say the date it ends and end it on that date.
- Referrals. A month at a reduced rate for a client who brings someone in costs you far less than acquiring that person any other way.
What each of these has in common is that the discount is exchanged for something. A discount given because someone hesitated is exchanged for nothing.
If the price is the actual objection — not the polite version of "I do not believe this will work" — the answer is a cheaper tier, not a cheaper Core. That is what Foundation is for, and how to handle price objections covers telling the two apart.
When to raise your prices
Four signals. One is enough; two means you are late.
- You are at capacity. A waiting list is the market telling you the price is under the value.
- You have not raised in 18 months. Costs went up. If your price did not, you took a pay cut and did not notice.
- Your results improved. More qualifications, better systems, a shelf of transformations. You are selling something better than you were.
- You resent the work. This is the one coaches ignore. Resenting a client is usually a pricing signal wearing an emotional disguise.
How to do it: new clients pay the new price from today. Existing clients get 30 days' notice and either move to the new price or stay on the old one for a defined period — six months is generous and clean. Say the number, say when, do not apologise, do not explain your costs. Clients who leave over a 10% rise were leaving anyway. The wording for that conversation is in how to raise your coaching prices.
Raise in increments of 10–20%. A rise from $250 to $500 is not a price change, it is a different business, and it needs a different offer to go with it.
Test the number before you commit to it
You do not have to guess right first time, and treating the price as a hypothesis rather than a declaration makes it much easier to set one at all.
Run the new price on the next five prospects only. Existing clients stay where they are. Then look at what actually happened, in this order:
- Nobody hesitated and everyone said yes. The price is too low. That is not a good result, it is a missed one — raise it 20% and run five more.
- Roughly half said yes. That is the number. A price that everybody accepts is under-set, and a price nobody accepts is either wrong or attached to an offer that has not proved itself yet.
- Everyone said no, on price. Either the price is genuinely above what this market pays, or the proof is not there yet. Those need different fixes: the first is a pricing problem, the second is a testimonials-and-results problem, and dropping the price will not solve the second one.
- Everyone said no, but not on price. Price is the polite objection. The offer is the problem.
Five is enough to see a pattern and few enough that being wrong costs you one month rather than one year. What you must not do is change the price and the offer and the sales page in the same week, because then you learn nothing about which one moved.
The mistakes that cost the most
Pricing for the client you were. You are not your client. Most coaches set prices they personally would pay, which anchors the whole business to the coach's own financial situation rather than the market's.
Not counting the unpaid hours. Sales calls, onboarding, admin, the Sunday night check-in backlog. If a client takes three hours a month and not the one you costed, your real rate is a third of what you think.
One price for wildly different clients. The person who needs a program and monthly contact and the person who needs daily accountability are not the same product. Charging them the same means overcharging one and being exploited by the other.
Hiding the price. "DM me for pricing" filters out serious buyers along with tyre-kickers, and it signals that the number depends on what you think they will pay. Publish it.
Never revisiting it. Pricing is not a decision you make once at launch. Look at it every six months against your capacity, your churn and your costs.
