Charge Less Than You Could
The pricing question is not what your course is worth. It is what the price does to the size of the audience that can say yes to it.
Justin Allan, NP4 min read
My courses sold for about $500. The competition was charging two to three thousand.
That was not a mistake, and it was not a beginner's price I forgot to raise. I could have charged more — the argument for it was sitting right there and I knew it. I priced under the market deliberately, for years, and I would do it again.
Here is the part that matters. Guess which business ended up with the bigger audience.
What the pricing advice gets right
Value-based pricing is real, and you should understand it before you argue with it.
The idea is that price follows perceived value rather than cost. And the cost side of a course business is close to nothing — you are not warehousing anything, not shipping anything, not manufacturing the second copy. So your price cannot come from what the thing cost you to make. It has to come from what the problem is worth to the person buying.
That question has real answers. Teach internal medicine physicians to pass a board exam, and you are standing between someone and their ability to keep working. That is worth a great deal. Teach a small procedural skill that makes someone's Tuesday marginally easier and you are worth a couple of hundred dollars. Identical effort from you. Wildly different value to them.
So put a number on the problem you solve. If you can do that, you have found your ceiling.
The mistake is assuming the ceiling is the answer.
What a lower price buys
Charge five thousand and you price people out. Charge five hundred and you price people in.
That sounds obvious right up until you look at what it does over three years instead of one quarter. Everyone who buys at the lower price is not simply a sale. They are someone who has now paid you once, which makes them far more likely to pay you again — for the next course, the membership, the consulting, the product you have not built yet. They are someone who might leave a review, or mention you to a colleague, or turn up in a group defending you to a stranger.
The competitor charging three thousand made more per sale. I made more customers. Customers compound in a way margin does not.
This is not a position about being affordable or generous. It is a claim about which asset is worth more at the end. A business with a large warm audience and modest per-sale revenue beats one with fat margins and a thin customer list, because everything you do afterward is cheaper when there are already people listening.
This is the kind of question a conversation settles faster than an article can.
Bring your subject, your profession, and the number you already have in your head. We will talk through what it would actually take.
Cheaper is a strategy — random is not
Some working numbers, from what I have seen hold up:
- A short course, one to two hours: $50 to $200
- A standard course, three to five hours: $400 to $500
- A comprehensive course, six to ten hours: $600 to $1,000
Those assume you want to be priced reasonably. If what you teach genuinely moves a professional's trajectory, double or triple them and you will still be defensible.
Above $2,500 in the professional space I would be careful. There is an abundance of continuing education out there and real competition, and past that number you stop asking for a purchase and start asking for a decision. The exception is a rare skill that changes a career, which can carry $2,500, $3,000, sometimes $5,000. Most people who believe they are that exception are not.
The variable nobody prices in
Early pricing and mature pricing are different problems, and the difference is that at the start nobody knows who you are.
Price is partly a claim about trust, and at launch you have not earned any. No reviews. No library of content. Nobody in your profession saying your name to someone else. Three thousand dollars from an unknown does not read as premium — it reads as a risk the buyer has no way to evaluate.
So open below your eventual number. Build the credibility that justifies more: content, reviews, a visible track record. Then charge what the work is worth to someone who now has reason to believe you.
The number is supposed to move. Most people set it once and never touch it again.
Finding the number
Three ways, cheapest first.
Ask. Build an audience and then ask it directly. I am putting together a course on this — does three hundred sound reasonable? People will tell you honestly. It costs nothing and almost nobody does it.
Split test. Same course, two prices, two landing pages, two ad campaigns, a couple of weeks. Then look at what happened. Sometimes the higher price wins outright because the price itself signals value. Sometimes the cheaper one does two to four times the volume. You will not reason your way to the answer — you have to run it.
Read your discounts carefully. If a thirty percent sale produces a big jump, that is information about your price. But be honest about what you are looking at: you cannot cleanly separate the discount from the urgency of the event. A sale creates a deadline, and deadlines move people regardless of price. Treat a large discount response as a signal worth investigating, not as proof you are priced wrong. And do not run sales so often that they stop feeling like events.
What the number is really deciding
Pricing gets talked about as a question about the course. It is not. It is a question about who ends up in the room.
A high price selects for the small group who can pay it. A lower price selects for volume, and volume is what turns a course into a business — because the second product, and the third, and the membership, all get sold to the audience the first price bought you.
Work out what your course is worth. Then decide, on purpose, how much of that you are willing to leave on the table in exchange for the people who come through the door because you did.