You already know you are underpriced. You worked it out months ago, and you have not done anything about it, because the number is not the hard part — the message to the twenty people already paying you the old rate is the hard part.
So this article spends very little time on whether you should raise your prices and most of it on the mechanics: how to set the new number, what to do with the clients you already have, how much notice to give, exactly what to write, and what happens when someone pushes back or leaves.
Set the number with arithmetic, not with nerve
The temptation is to pick a number you feel you can defend, which is always a number slightly above the one you have. That is how coaches end up raising 8% every two years and never catching up.
Work it the other way around. Take the revenue you need, divide by the number of clients you can coach at the standard you want to be known for, and add a margin for churn and quiet months. The full calculation — costs, capacity, occupancy — is in how to price online coaching packages. Run it before you go any further, because everything below assumes you have a target number and not a feeling.
Then move towards that number in steps of 10–20%. Two reasons. A 15% rise is an adjustment a client absorbs; a 60% rise is a different product, and if you have not changed the product it reads as opportunism. And a smaller rise you actually send beats a larger one you keep postponing.
If the gap between your current price and your target is large — say you are at $180 and the maths says $320 — you are looking at two or three rises over eighteen months, not one. Plan them as a sequence and put the dates in your calendar now.
Work out how many clients you can afford to lose
This is the calculation that removes most of the fear, and almost nobody does it.
A price rise does not need to keep everyone. It needs to leave you with at least the same revenue, and the number of clients that requires is smaller than you think. The break-even loss is the rise divided by one plus the rise:
Break-even loss = increase ÷ (1 + increase)
A 20% rise: 0.20 ÷ 1.20 = 16.7% of your roster
| Price rise | Share of clients you can lose and still be flat |
|---|---|
| 10% | 9% |
| 15% | 13% |
| 20% | 17% |
| 25% | 20% |
| 30% | 23% |
| 50% | 33% |
And breaking even is the floor, not the goal. Every client who leaves gives you back their share of your week — the programming, the check-in, the messages — which is capacity you can sell at the new price. Losing four clients and replacing two of them at the higher rate leaves you with more money and a lighter roster than you started with. How many clients an online coach can handle covers what that freed-up capacity is actually worth.
A worked example: 30 clients, a 20% rise
Say you coach 30 clients at an average of $250 a month. That is $7,500 a month, $90,000 a year, and your roster is full.
You raise to $300 — a 20% rise. Break-even is $7,500 ÷ $300 = 25 clients. You can lose five people, one in six, and be exactly where you were, with five hours a week back.
| Clients who leave | Clients remaining | Monthly revenue | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 30 | $9,000 | +$1,500 |
| 2 | 28 | $8,400 | +$900 |
| 4 | 26 | $7,800 | +$300 |
| 5 | 25 | $7,500 | $0 |
| 8 | 22 | $6,600 | −$900 |
Now put realistic numbers on it. On a 20% rise with proper notice, most coaches lose a handful — and the ones who go are usually the clients who were already half out the door, missing check-ins and not logging. Say four leave. You are $300 a month ahead, you have four fewer people to chase, and you have four open spots at $300 rather than $250. Fill two of them and you are at $8,400 a month with a smaller roster than you had in September.
The fear is almost always larger than the churn. Coaches brace for a third of the roster walking and lose two or three people, most of whom would have cancelled by Christmas anyway.
Four ways to handle your existing clients
There is no single right answer here, but there is a wrong one, which is deciding client by client as each conversation happens. Pick one policy, apply it to everyone, and say what it is.
| Approach | What happens | The honest trade-off |
|---|---|---|
| Grandfather permanently | Existing clients keep the old rate for as long as they stay | Loyal clients are safe, but you carry two price lists forever and your revenue only moves as old clients churn |
| Grandfather for a fixed period | Old rate held for 3–12 months, then everyone moves | The rise arrives, but you have the same conversation twice |
| Move everyone | All clients move on the same date after notice | Fastest, cleanest, highest short-term churn |
| New clients only | Existing roster untouched, new signups pay the new price | Zero risk today, and the problem is exactly the same in a year |
Grandfathering permanently is the most generous option and the costliest one. If your roster is stable and your churn is low — which is the situation coaches who ask this question are usually in — you could be three years away from the average price you calculated. It also creates a quiet unfairness: the client who joined last month pays $300 for the same service as the one paying $200, and clients talk.
Grandfathering for a fixed period is the middle path and the one most coaches should take. Six months is generous, clean and finite. The catch is that you have to actually end it on the date, and sending the second message six months later takes the same nerve as the first.
Moving everyone at once is the right call when the gap between your price and your value has become obvious, or when you are close to capacity and would rather trade a few clients for a lighter week. It concentrates all the churn into one month, which is uncomfortable and also means it is over.
New clients only is not really a price rise; it is a decision to wait. It is defensible for about six months, and it is the option to choose when your roster is thin and you cannot afford to lose anyone. Set the date you will revisit it.
One mechanical note that decides more of this than coaches expect: on most platforms an existing subscription keeps the price it was created at. In Fitsly, changing a package's price never affects current subscribers — they keep the price and the commitment terms from when they signed up, and the new price applies to new purchases. That makes grandfathering the default and moving people across a deliberate act: you cancel the old subscription and they buy the new package. Worth knowing before you promise a date you cannot deliver. The details are on the payments and packages page.
How much notice to give
Thirty days is the standard, and it is enough. Less than that and it reads as a decision made about the client rather than communicated to them. More than 60 days and you have simply given yourself two months of dreading it.
Notice means one message with a date, not a warning followed by a reminder followed by the change. Send it once, put the date in it, and let the billing do the rest.
Your billing cadence changes when the rise actually lands. Weekly billing means the new rate hits within days of the date, monthly means the next cycle, and a client who paid six months upfront will not see it until their renewal — which is the correct answer, not a problem to solve. Weekly, monthly or upfront covers how those cadences behave. If your payments still run on manual invoices or bank transfers, sort that out before the rise rather than during it; how to take payments as an online coach covers the setup.
What to say, word for word
Short, dated, unapologetic. Something like this:
Hi Sam,
From 1 December my coaching rate goes to $300 a month. You'll stay on your
current rate until 1 June, and your billing will change from that date.
Nothing about how we work together changes. If you want to talk it through,
message me any time.
Jeremy
That is the whole message. Four sentences: the new number, the date it applies to them, a statement that the service is unchanged, and an open door. Send it individually, not as a broadcast, and send it as a message rather than an email if that is how you normally talk to them.
No apology. "I'm so sorry to have to do this" tells the client you think the new price is unreasonable. If you do not believe the number, they will not either.
No cost justification. Do not mention rent, software, insurance, inflation or your tax bill. Clients are not buying your overheads and they did not agree to fund them. The moment you justify the rise with your costs, the price becomes negotiable on those grounds, and next year you have to prove your costs went up again.
No long explanation. Every extra paragraph reads as a defence, and a defence invites a rebuttal. Coaches write five paragraphs about their new certification, their improved check-in process and how much they have invested in the business. It converts a routine notice into an argument the client did not know they were having.
No asking. "I hope that's okay?" and "let me know if that works for you" turn a decision into a request, and a request can be declined. State it.
The client who pushes back, and the client who leaves
Most people reply with some version of "no problem". A few will push. Answer once, briefly, and do not add anything new.
If they ask why: "It's the first increase in two years, and it brings you in line with what I charge now." That is it. Do not elaborate.
If they ask you to hold their rate: you can, once, with a date on it. "I can keep you at the current rate until the end of March." What you must not do is agree to an open-ended exception, because you will be running two price lists in your head for the rest of the relationship, and they will expect the same answer next time.
If the objection is really about money rather than about you, offer a smaller package instead of a discount — fortnightly check-ins, template-based programming, group messaging. Telling a genuine budget objection apart from a value objection is the whole skill, and how to handle price objections covers how.
When someone leaves, let them. Reply warmly, cancel cleanly, leave the door open, and do not counter-offer. A client who only stays at a 20% discount is a client you will be resenting in three months. Ask what changed, take the answer at face value, and use it.
Then go and fill the spot at the new price. The single most common mistake after a rise is treating the smaller roster as the outcome rather than as capacity, and spending the freed-up hours worrying about the people who left instead of speaking to the people who have not signed up yet.
