I Spent Years Undercharging and Told Myself It Was Generous

For about three years I was the cheapest person in every room I was in, and I thought that made me the good guy.

Someone would ask what I charged and I'd say a number I knew was low, and then I'd watch their shoulders drop with relief, and I'd feel great about it. I told myself I was being generous. I was making it accessible. I was the guy who didn't gouge people.

Here's what was actually happening. I was making it easy for people not to show up.

Cheap clients don't finish

The first time I noticed the pattern I didn't believe it. I had a handful of people paying me a few hundred dollars, and I had one person paying me three thousand. Guess who did the work.

The three thousand dollar client did every assignment. She came to every call with questions written down. She finished the thing she came to finish.

The few-hundred-dollar clients mostly disappeared around week four. Not because they were bad people, and not because the coaching was different, because I gave them the exact same thing. They disappeared because three hundred dollars is an amount you can walk away from without it costing you anything. It never became real.

That's the part nobody tells you about underpricing. You think the risk is that you make less money. The real risk is that your work stops working. And once your work stops working you don't have testimonials, you don't have results, you don't have anyone telling their friends, and now you actually can't charge more, because you've got nothing to point at.

When you charge more, people pay attention. When people pay attention, they get results. That's not a mindset thing. That's just what happens.

The number I was too scared to say

Eventually I decided to charge three thousand dollars for a ninety-day program.

I want to be honest about how that felt, because I think this is the part people skip. It felt like lying. I sat there with the number in my mouth and every version of me was certain that the person on the other end of the call was going to laugh, or be offended, or say something like "for guitar lessons?"

Nobody laughed. One person asked if they could pay it in two parts. That was the whole reckoning I'd been dreading for three years.

And the thing I've since watched happen to dozens of people is that the fear was never really about the client. It was about me. I hadn't decided the work was worth it, so I couldn't say the number like someone who had.

You can hear it in someone's voice. Clients can hear it. When you flinch at your own price, you've told them the price is negotiable and the value is questionable, and you did it before they said a word.

How I actually price things now

I stopped pricing my time. Nobody wants an hour of your time. Here's the math I use instead.

One. What's the result? Not what you deliver, what changes for them. "Twelve coaching calls" is not a result. "You'll have finished songs you're proud of and a way of working that doesn't stall" is a result. If you can't say the result in one sentence, that's your problem, not your price.

Two. What pain goes away? People pay far more to stop something than to start something. What is the thing they're sick of? Being stuck. Starting sixty songs and finishing none. Feeling like a hobbyist at forty. That pain has a price, and it's usually higher than you think.

Three. What would it cost them to figure this out alone? This is the one that changed everything for me. If someone spends the next five years figuring out on their own what I could walk them through in ninety days, what did those five years cost? Not just money. The songs they didn't write. The version of themselves they postponed.

When you hold your price up against that number, three thousand dollars stops sounding like a lot and starts sounding like a bargain, which it is.

That's how I got from three thousand to ten and fifteen thousand dollar engagements. Not by adding more calls. By getting clearer about what actually changes.

Don't just drop them at the airport

One more thing, because a high price you can't deliver on is worse than a low one.

A lot of people sell information and call it transformation. They hand someone a course, or a folder of PDFs, or twelve hours of video, and then they walk away. It's like driving somebody to the airport, dropping them off, and never telling them where they're going.

If you're going to charge properly, you owe them the destination. That means a repeatable framework, not just your opinions. It means knowing the three or four places everyone gets stuck and having an answer ready before they hit it. It means being in their corner when they want to quit at week six, because they always want to quit at week six.

Do that, and the price stops being a conversation you dread and becomes the most honest part of the whole arrangement.

If you're sitting on a number you know is too low

I've built Songwriting for Guitar past seven figures in sales, and almost none of that came from being clever with funnels. It came from finally charging an amount that made both sides take it seriously.

If you know your number is too low and you can't quite make yourself change it, the problem usually isn't the number. It's that you haven't pinned down what result you're actually promising. Start there.

Take the clarity quiz — five questions on how clear you are on your direction, your offer, and who it's for. It takes about two minutes and it'll tell you which of those three is the one holding your pricing back.