I can see your browser. Three tabs open, all of them join pages belonging to people who do roughly what you do, and you are squinting at their monthly rates trying to reverse engineer a decision. One of them charges nineteen. One charges forty nine. One does not list a price at all, which you have decided is either very sophisticated or a red flag.
Close the tabs. They cannot help you, and I want to show you a different way to find your number that has the enormous advantage of being about your actual life.
Why the competitor screenshot is useless
That forty nine dollar community might be run by someone with a full time employee, an audience ten times yours, and a partner covering the mortgage. The nineteen dollar one might be a side project run by someone who does not need the income and answers questions once a fortnight. The one with no price might be doing enterprise deals or might just be nervous.
You cannot see any of that. All you can see is a number, stripped of everything that made the number make sense. Copying it is like copying somebody's marathon pace without knowing their training history or how far they are actually running.
Worse, market rate reasoning quietly assumes your costs are the same as theirs, and in this business the main cost is not software or hosting. It is you. Your hours, your attention, your patience at nine at night. That cost is completely specific to your situation, and it is the thing your price actually has to cover.
So let us start there instead.
Step one: how many hours can you honestly give this
Not how many you wish you could. How many you can give in an ordinary month, in a month where somebody is ill and the car needs work and you are also doing whatever else pays your bills.
Write down a real number. For a lot of creators running a community alongside other work, it is somewhere between fifteen and forty hours a month. If you are full time on it, maybe a hundred and twenty, and please do not write down a hundred and sixty, because that is not a working month, that is a countdown.
This number is your ceiling on everything that follows. It is also the most commonly skipped step in every pricing conversation I have ever had, which is why so many creators end up with a price that only works if they never rest.
Step two: sort the hours into fixed and variable
Some of your work does not change much whether you have thirty members or three hundred. Call these your fixed hours.
Running the monthly call. Writing the weekly post. Planning. Fixing the thing that broke. Filing the tax paperwork. Whether ten people or a hundred show up, the call still takes ninety minutes to prepare and sixty to deliver.
Other work scales directly with headcount. Call these your per member hours.
Replying to individual questions. Welcoming newcomers properly. Handling a billing problem. Giving feedback on somebody's work. Noticing that a person has gone quiet and checking in.
This is the split that decides everything, and most people have never made it explicitly. Add up your fixed hours per month first. Then estimate your per member minutes, honestly, including the small invisible ones. Ten minutes a month per member sounds trivial until you multiply it.
Step three: find your real capacity
Take your total available hours, subtract your fixed hours, and you are left with the pool available for per member work. Divide that pool by your per member time and you have your genuine capacity: the number of members you can serve at the standard you want to be proud of.
Let us walk one through, with obviously made up numbers so you can see the shape.
Say you can give thirty hours a month. Your fixed work comes to twelve hours: one live session prepared and delivered, four weekly posts, and a couple of hours of admin. That leaves eighteen hours, or one thousand and eighty minutes, for per member work.
Now be honest about per member time. If you want to properly welcome new people, reply to questions the same day, and give real feedback rather than a thumbs up, twelve minutes a month per member is not generous, it is realistic. One thousand and eighty divided by twelve is ninety.
Ninety members. That is your capacity at that service level with that calendar. Not a nice round aspiration. An arithmetic result.
Step four: now the price falls out
Decide what you need this to earn. Not what you dream it earns. What it needs to contribute to your household in a normal month, after the platform fees, payment processing, whatever software you actually pay for, and the portion you set aside for tax, which in most places is a real and unfun number.
Say you need three thousand a month to land in your pocket. Add roughly a third on top for fees and tax set aside, so call it four thousand of revenue. Divide by your ninety member capacity and you get about forty five per member per month.
There it is. Not copied from anyone. Derived from your calendar, your standards, and your household.
Now compare that to the nineteen dollar community you were staring at. To hit four thousand at nineteen you would need roughly two hundred and ten members, which is more than double the capacity your hours support. Which means one of three things has to give: the price, the service level, or you. In practice it is always you, and it happens quietly over about fourteen months.
When the number comes out wrong
Often the first pass produces a price that makes you wince. Good. That wince is information. You have exactly four levers and it is worth knowing all of them.
Raise the price. The obvious one, and usually the correct one. Read your derived number again and notice that it came from arithmetic rather than from confidence. That helps.
Cut per member time by design, not by neglect. This is the interesting lever. If you can turn one to one work into one to many work, your capacity rises without your hours moving. Answer the common question once, in public, permanently, instead of forty times in private. Hold a shared office hour instead of individual replies. Let members answer each other, which they will do enthusiastically if you make room and thank them for it.
Reduce fixed hours. Do you really need a weekly post and a monthly call and a newsletter? Many founders are carrying a delivery load they invented during the launch, when adrenaline was covering the cost.
Change the shape of the offer. If the arithmetic says forty five and you are convinced your people cannot pay forty five, you may be looking at a different business: a smaller high touch group at a much higher price, or a genuinely low touch community with a lower price and honest expectations. Both work. What does not work is high touch service at low touch pricing.
The capacity ceiling is good news
Here is the part I love. Once you know your capacity is around ninety, all sorts of decisions become easy and calm.
You can close the doors at ninety without guilt, because the number is not a marketing tactic, it is a fact about your week.
You can stop feeling bad about not growing. Growth beyond capacity is not success, it is a service quality problem with a nicer name.
You can spot exactly what would need to change to serve more people, and decide whether you want that. Usually the answer involves paying somebody, at which point their cost joins the labour budget and the whole model updates cleanly.
And when a member asks why you charge what you charge, you have a real answer that does not involve the word value or a nervous laugh.
Two things to be careful about
Do not let the budget make you stingy in the wrong places. There is a version of this thinking that turns every member interaction into a cost centre, and members can feel that. The arithmetic exists so you can be generous sustainably, not so you can start rationing warmth.
And keep the money side clean. Never store card details yourself, ever. Let your payment processor hold that and be glad it is their problem rather than yours. When you talk about pricing publicly, do not publish other people's financial information or use somebody's hardship as a marketing story. Their circumstances are theirs.
Recheck it twice a year
Your calendar changes. A new baby, a new job, a health thing, a helper joining, a season where you simply have less. Any of those changes your available hours, which changes your capacity, which changes your price or your service level.
Put a recurring note in your calendar every six months that says: redo the labour budget. It takes twenty minutes once you have the spreadsheet, and it is the single most reliable early warning system for founder burnout that I know of. The numbers will tell you that you are overcommitted about four months before your body does.
Do this this week
Write down your honest monthly hours. The unglamorous, illness-and-car-trouble-included number.
Split your work into fixed hours and per member minutes. Be generous with the per member estimate, because you always underestimate the small stuff.
Do the division and find your real capacity.
Divide your needed revenue by that capacity and look at the number that appears.
Sit with it for a day, then act on it. Raise the price, cut the fixed load, or convert one to one work into one to many work. Any of the three is progress.
Then reopen those three competitor tabs, look at their prices one more time, and enjoy the fact that they no longer mean anything to you. That feeling is worth the twenty minutes of arithmetic all by itself.