Pricing a one-hour consult

A guy named Jake emailed me last month asking how I priced my consult. I wrote him back a long reply, realised halfway through I’d never actually written this down anywhere, and here we are.

I sell one-hour consults and nothing else. One call, one invoice, done. No discovery call, no retainer, no “let me send over a statement of work.” The price on the page is the price.

People want to know how I landed on the number. Here’s the useful part, and then the part nobody tells you.

The morning-after test

Here’s the trick that did more than anything to get my pricing right.

Whatever you’re charging, imagine you just hung up on a consult. It went fine. Client was friendly, you helped, nobody’s unhappy. It’s 9am the next day. You’re making coffee. How do you feel?

If you feel fine, you’re priced about right. If you feel like you’d rather have been shipping your own thing, your price is too low. Not because you’re greedy. Because the money has to cover both the hour you spent and the hour you didn’t spend on your own work. Opportunity cost is real, and it shows up in your gut before it shows up on a spreadsheet.

I moved my price three times on this test alone. Each time it was because a few mornings in a row the answer was “I would rather have shipped.” The number went from $500 to $750 to what it is now, and demand didn’t change once. The only thing that changed was how I felt on Tuesday mornings.

Better than a market survey. Better than asking friends. Better than a conversion rate. Your gut updates faster than any of that.

Why I stopped letting the price climb

There’s a ceiling too, and I hit it by accident.

Past a certain point, people who booked started expecting a deliverable. They’d ask for a memo, a follow-up, a Slack thread. Anything tangible to justify what they’d paid. That’s a different product. That’s a mini-consulting engagement, not a consult. Different margins, different headaches, different version of me to run it.

I didn’t want that business. So now the ceiling is “the highest I can charge without the client quietly expecting more than sixty minutes of talking.” Below that, they’re buying my time and leaving happy. Above it, they’re buying an outcome I never promised, and we’re going to end up in an awkward email thread.

Know there’s a ceiling. Don’t blow past it by accident.

The part nobody writes about

The price isn’t the hard part. Holding the scope is.

Every person who books will try — usually without realising it — to turn an hour into three. They’ll email follow-up questions the next day. They’ll ask you to pre-read a deck. They’ll reschedule twice and show up unprepared. They’ll DM you a week later with “quick question.” If you say yes to any of it, the real hourly rate plummets and you’ll start to resent the whole thing.

The fix is being blunt before they ever book. My page literally says: one hour, no follow-ups, no implementation work, no pre-reads. About one in ten prospects reads that and bounces. Those are the ones who’d have caused most of the scope problems. Good filter.

The fraud feeling, and what actually kills it

You will sometimes feel like a fraud for charging money to talk for sixty minutes. This feeling is persistent and it is wrong, but “it’s wrong” isn’t enough to make it go away.

What worked for me was a little text file I started keeping a year in. Every time a client emailed back later with an outcome, I logged it. One founder shipped a feature she’d been stuck on for four months. Another killed a project that would have cost her $80k to build. One guy pivoted his product’s positioning off a single sentence I said near the end of the call.

None of those outcomes were worth an hourly rate. They were worth ten times the hourly rate, at least. Once that file had six or seven entries, the fraud feeling just evaporated. The rate turned into a rounding error on the outcome, and I stopped flinching when people paid.

If you’re just starting out and you don’t have the file yet, borrow mine: assume the price you’re nervous about is already too low, and find out for real by charging it.

If you’re sitting on a pricing page tonight

Pick a number that passes the morning-after test. Write the scope in one sentence. Enforce it on the booking page so the scope-creepers self-select out. Then raise the price every six months until someone emails back “that’s too high for me” — not as a negotiation, just a real no.

The first real no tells you where the market actually is. Until then, you’re guessing. Guess high.