Business Coaching · Calculator
Price your service on arithmetic, not guesswork.
Three legitimate ways exist to set a price — cost-plus (start from what it costs you), value-based (start from what it's worth to the client) and market-based (start from what others already charge). This page turns your own numbers into a cost-plus rate, a break-even point, a capacity check and the exact arithmetic of a discount — and is honest about where a calculator's usefulness ends.
Every result below is arithmetic on the fields you fill in — see “About this page” under Sources.
01 — Three Methods
Cost-plus, value-based, market-based.
Cost-plus pricing adds a margin on top of what it costs you to deliver — your time, your overhead, your target income. It's the floor: a price below your cost-plus rate loses money on every unit, full stop, regardless of what the market or the client thinks.
Value-based pricing starts from the outcome for the client rather than your costs — what would it cost them to solve this themselves, or to hire the next-best alternative, or to live without the outcome at all? It has no universal formula; it's a judgement call you make about a specific client's specific situation, which is why the calculator below doesn't pretend to compute it — instead it gives you a short set of questions to work through, on your own or with the concierge.
Market-based (competitive) pricing starts from what comparable providers already charge for comparable work. This page will never tell you what "the market" charges, because no single figure is honest across regions, experience levels, service types and specialisations — you enter the rate you've genuinely observed, and the calculator compares it to your own cost-plus number.
In practice, most solo practices triangulate: compute the cost-plus floor so you never price below viability, gut-check it against the value-based questions so you're not leaving money on the table, and sanity-check both against what you've actually seen comparable providers charge.
02 — The Calculator
Enter your own numbers.
Every field below is yours to fill in — nothing is prefilled from an "industry standard," and nothing you type is sent anywhere. Change any number and the results update live.
What that computes to
- Cost-plus hourly rate
- ₹–
- Annual billable hours
- –
- Contribution margin per unit
- ₹–
- Contribution margin %
- –
- Break-even units / month
- –
03 — Capacity & Discounting
How full you are, and what a discount really costs.
Capacity utilisation tells you whether you have room to take more clients at today's price, or whether hours — not demand — are your real constraint. The discount calculator shows the extra volume a price cut requires just to break even on it, using only your own contribution margin from above.
What that computes to
- Capacity utilisation
- –
- Spare billable hours / month
- –
- Extra volume needed to break even on the discount
- –
04 — FAQ
Common questions.
What's the difference between cost-plus, value-based and market-based pricing?
Cost-plus starts from what it costs you to deliver and adds a margin. Value-based starts from what the outcome is worth to the client. Market-based starts from what comparable providers already charge. Most solo practices sanity-check a price against all three rather than picking just one.
Does this calculator tell me what to charge?
No. It converts your own income target, costs, hours and observed market rate into a cost-plus rate, a break-even point and a capacity-utilisation figure. Every number it shows came from a field you typed — it never inserts an "industry average" fee, because no single average fee is honest across regions, experience levels and service types.
Why does the discount section warn me sometimes?
If your proposed discount percentage is larger than your contribution margin percentage, the arithmetic breaks — you'd be selling below variable cost, and no volume increase can fix that. The calculator flags this rather than showing a nonsensical number.
What is capacity utilisation and why does it affect pricing?
It is the share of your maximum possible billable hours you actually deliver (actual ÷ maximum × 100). A solo practice below capacity has room to take more clients at the same rate; one near or above capacity should raise price before adding more hours, since hours are the genuinely scarce resource.
Is this financial or tax advice?
No. It is general strategic arithmetic. GST treatment, invoicing and anything you file with a tax authority should go through a chartered accountant — this page and Amit's coaching sit alongside that, not instead of it. See the desk's own GST registration basics guide for the compliance side.
05 — Sources
Where the concepts come from
- U.S. Small Business Administration, “Break-even point” — break-even quantity = fixed costs ÷ (price − variable cost per unit).sba.gov/business-guide/plan-your-business/calculate-your-startup-costs/break-even-point · accessed 27 Jul 2026
- Corporate Finance Institute — “Value-Based Pricing” and “Break-Even Analysis,” reference definitions for the three pricing methods and the break-even/contribution-margin identities used above.corporatefinanceinstitute.com · accessed 27 Jul 2026
- Marn, M.V. & Rosiello, R.L. “Managing Price, Gaining Profit.” Harvard Business Review, September–October 1992 — on why price changes move operating profit more than proportional changes in volume or variable cost, the finding behind the discount-arithmetic section above.hbr.org/1992/09/managing-price-gaining-profit · accessed 27 Jul 2026
About this page: every number shown by the calculator is computed live in your browser from the fields you fill in. No industry-average rate, typical fee or benchmark figure appears anywhere on this page — where a real number would be useful (a market rate, a fee), the field is yours to fill in from your own research, not ours to assert.
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The Concierge
Talk through your pricing.
The AJ India concierge can walk through the value-based questions with you, or explain any part of the arithmetic above in plain words — and will say when a session with Amit is the better next step.