How to price online coaching without underselling yourself

Ask ten trainers how they priced their online coaching and nine will tell you some version of the same story: they looked at what other coaches charge, picked a number slightly below it, and hoped. That approach feels safe, but it anchors your income to someone else's business model — usually one with different costs, a different client base, and different goals.

Here is a more honest way to work it out.

Start with the income you need, not the price

Work backwards. Decide what you need to earn each month, estimate how many clients you can genuinely serve well, and divide. If you need £4,000 a month and can properly support 20 online clients, your floor is £200 per client per month. Everything below that number is a discount you are giving away by default.

Price is what your client pays. Cost is what delivering the coaching takes out of you. Most underpriced coaches have confused the two.

That capacity number deserves more thought than it usually gets. Twenty clients with weekly check-ins is a different job from twenty clients on monthly reviews. Count the real hours — programming, check-ins, messages, the thinking in the shower — and be suspicious of any plan that only works if you never take a holiday.

The three common models

None of these is "correct". The mistake is mixing them accidentally — selling a retainer but delivering block-programme effort, or quoting hybrid prices for online-only work.

For context rather than instruction: UK consumer price guides such as Bark's put the average session around £40, with £25–60 typical and London running £50–70 or more. Treat those numbers as a sanity check, not a strategy. The coach charging £60 in Leeds is not overpriced; they are differently positioned.

What to include at each tier

A simple three-tier structure covers most coaching businesses:

• Programming only — the plan, updated on a schedule, no contact in between.
• Programming plus check-ins — weekly reviews, form feedback, adjustments.
• Full coaching — everything above, plus nutrition targets and message access.

Resist the urge to add a fourth tier. More options slow decisions down; three is enough to anchor value and let clients self-select.

"That's too expensive"

You will hear it, and it is worth deciding in advance what it means. Sometimes it means the person is not your client, which is fine — a full roster of underpaying clients is just a hard job with extra admin. Sometimes it means you explained the price before you explained the work. Walk a prospect through what a month actually contains — the programme, the reviews, the adjustments, the access — and £250 stops sounding like a gym membership with stretch goals.

What "too expensive" should never trigger is an on-the-spot discount. A quietly negotiable rate teaches every future client to negotiate, and word travels further than you think. If you want a lower entry point, that is what the programming-only tier is for.

Raising rates without losing sleep

Your first price will be wrong, usually on the low side, and fixing it is easier than the dread suggests. New clients simply get the new rate. Existing clients get notice, a date, and a sentence of reasoning — "from March, coaching moves to £240; your results this year are the reason I can charge it". Most stay. The few who leave were priced on the old number, not on the coaching, and their places go to clients who are not.

A useful discipline: revisit the arithmetic every six months. If your diary is full and there is a waiting list, the market is telling you the number is low.

Mind the fees you cannot see

Whatever you charge, look hard at what reaches your bank account. A £200/month client on a platform charging £40 in subscription and payment fees is really a £160 client. Software with a monthly fee costs you the same in a quiet month as in a busy one — which is exactly backwards.

That asymmetry is why NForge charges a single transaction fee and nothing monthly: when you earn nothing, you pay nothing. The side-by-side comparisons run that maths against the usual subscription tools at three revenue levels, if you want it worked through. And whichever tools you use, the mechanics of actually collecting the money deserve as much attention as the number on the invoice.

A number you can defend

Pricing confidence comes from arithmetic, not bravado. When a prospect asks why you charge £250 a month, you want a real answer: this is what the check-ins, the programming time, and the experience behind them cost — and this is what they return. Set the number from your own economics, write it down, and stop apologising for it.