Ask a room of service owners how they set their prices and most will give you some version of the same answer. They looked at what a few competitors charged, landed a touch below, and called it positioning. That's not a pricing strategy. It's volunteering to be a commodity, and commodities only ever compete one way, which is downward, until the margin is gone and the only clients left are the ones who'll leave the second someone cheaper shows up.
Alex Hormozi makes the case in $100M Offersthat the way out is to stop being comparable at all. If a buyer can line you up next to three other options and the only difference is the number, you've already lost. So the first job of pricing isn't picking a figure. It's making yourself hard to compare, then charging what the result is worth. That's what this guide is about: how to price your services so the number works for you instead of against you.
“The goal is not to be cheaper. It is to be incomparable.”
Adapted from Alex Hormozi, $100M Offers
Before the price: find a starving crowd
Your price is mostly decided before you ever name it, by who you sell to. The most elegant value based pricing in the world falls flat on a market that's broke, hard to reach, or already shrinking. So the real first move is choosing the market. Hormozi's shorthand is a “starving crowd”, and it passes four checks. Run any market you're eyeing through all four before you argue about a single dollar.
In real pain
Does this market hurt right now?
A market that wants the result is fine. A market that's actively bleeding from not having it pays faster and argues less.
Has the money
Can they actually pay your number?
Purchasing power isn't optional. A desperate market with no budget is a charity rather than a business, so pick buyers who already spend on this problem.
Easy to reach
Can you get in front of them on purpose?
If you can't target them cheaply and repeatedly, the price barely matters, because the seats stay empty. Look for a group that already gathers somewhere.
Growing, not shrinking
Is the wave rising under them?
A growing market forgives mistakes and pulls you up, while a dying one punishes everything. Ride a trend that's heading the same way you are.
Notice that price barely appears in those four checks, and yet they decide almost everything about what you can charge. A market in genuine pain, with money, that you can reach and that's rising, will pay premium prices without you having to be a genius at copywriting. A weak market resists every number you try. Pick the crowd first.
Cost plus versus value based pricing
Once you've got the right buyers, the question becomes how to set the figure. There are really only two ways to do it, and they pull in opposite directions. One quietly traps you as a commodity, and the other lets you escape.
Add up your costs, stick a margin on top, hope it beats the next quote.
- Anchored to your hours, not their outcome
- Invites a side-by-side comparison on price
- Caps your upside at whatever the market pays
- Trains you to compete as a commodity
Price a slice of the result the client gets, so the better the outcome, the higher the fee.
- Anchored to the money, time, or pain on the table
- Hard to compare, because you are not the same
- Upside scales with the value you create
- Trains you to differentiate, not discount
Cost plus feels safe because it's math you can defend. The catch is that it ties your price to your effort, and effort is roughly the same whether the client makes a thousand dollars or a hundred thousand. Value based pricing breaks that link. You charge a slice of what the client actually gets, so when you help someone win big, you win with them. That's the model worth building a business on.
Why charging more makes the work better
A higher price does more than protect your margin. It changes who shows up and how hard they try. People value what they pay for, and they act on what they value. Charge someone properly and they treat the work like it matters, because to them it now does. That's the lever that turns price into results, and it sounds like a slogan right up until you've watched it happen.
Which sets up the most important idea in this whole guide. Price isn't a one-time decision. It's a loop. Set it high and you start a virtuous cycle; set it low and you start a vicious one. Same business, opposite directions.
Price drives quality. Each turn earns the right to charge more.
Discounting drives decay. Each turn forces you to charge less.
Read the two loops side by side and the strategy gets obvious. On the left, the price you charge buys you better clients, who get better outcomes, which gives you proof, which earns the right to charge even more next time. On the right, every discount drags in a worse client, who gets a worse result, who gives you no proof and plenty of refunds, which leaves you scared to raise the price, so you cut it again. The discount that felt like a kindness was the first step down.
How much should you actually charge?
There's no perfect formula, but there's a reliable direction, and the direction is almost always up. If nearly everyone says yes to your price without a flicker of hesitation, you're too cheap and you're leaving both money and commitment on the table. A healthy price stings a little for the right buyer and is a flat no for the wrong one. The practical move is to test upward on new clients only. Raise the number on the next batch, keep everything else the same, and watch your close rate and your client quality at the same time. Most owners discover they could have doubled long ago.
If you want a sharper way to justify a premium number, score your offer on the four levers in the value equation. The bigger the dream outcome and the more certain it feels, the higher the price the market will carry, and the easier raising it becomes.
Where a premium price is easiest to charge: the room
A price on a static pricing page has to win the argument before the buyer has felt any value. That's the hardest place on earth to charge a premium, because the number arrives naked, with no context, next to your competitors' numbers. A webinar flips that completely. You get to build the value first, in order, while attention is high. You show the outcome and stack the proof until the result feels inevitable for them specifically, and only then, once the value is sitting high in the room, do you name the price. By that point the figure feels small against what they now believe is possible. Premium offers sell live for exactly this reason.
That sequence (value first, price last, with the proof and the buy button in the same room) is what Webinly is built to run. Whether you charge for the seat with a paid workshop or pitch a high-ticket offer at the end of a free session, the checkout lives right there in the live or evergreen room, so nobody has to cool off on a separate page while the value is still high. If you want the structure that wraps around the number, start with how to create an irresistible offer.
Turn the offer into sales, in the room
Build it once, go live or evergreen, and take the payment inside the webinar. That is the part Webinly handles for you.
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The one thing to take away
Stop pricing against your competitors and start pricing against the result. Pick a starving crowd, set a value based number that makes the right client lean in and the wrong one walk, then keep nudging it up as your proof grows. Do that and you're out of the race to the bottom, running the cycle that funds better clients, better work, and a price you never have to apologize for.
References
Hormozi, Alex. $100M Offers: How To Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid Saying No. Acquisition.com Publishing, 2021. The commodity problem, the starving crowd test, and the price cycle are drawn from his work on pricing. The examples, the model comparison, and the webinar application here are our own.