The Dollars-for-Hours Trap
Most service providers start their business trading time for money. A consultant charges by the hour. A coach sells sessions. A trainer bills by the day. It works—until it doesn't.
The problem with dollars-for-hours is that there's a ceiling. You can only work so many hours. You can only raise your rates so high before clients push back. Eventually, you hit a revenue plateau that you can't break through without burning yourself out.
Courses offer a way out of this trap—but only if you price them based on the transformation you deliver, not the hours of content you create.
Value-Based Pricing
Here's a thought experiment: If your course helps someone land a job that pays $20,000 more per year, what is that course worth? If your program helps a business add $50,000 in revenue, what should you charge?
Value-based pricing means setting your price based on the outcome students achieve, not the inputs you provide. A course with five hours of video can be worth more than one with fifty hours—if those five hours deliver a more meaningful transformation.
This is why the most successful course creators spend so much time getting clear on their transformation promise. The clearer and more valuable that transformation, the more you can charge for it.
The Offering Portfolio
Relying on a single course for all your revenue is risky. What happens when students finish your course? What about people who can't afford your flagship program? What about those who want more personalized support?
A sustainable course business includes multiple offerings at different price points:
1Flagship Course
Your signature program that delivers your complete transformation. This is typically your highest-priced self-paced offering, ranging from $500 to $2,000 or more depending on your niche and the value delivered.
2Leveraged Coaching
Group coaching programs that combine your course content with live support. By working with multiple clients simultaneously, you can offer more personalized attention than a course alone while still scaling beyond one-on-one work.
3Membership Community
Ongoing access to you, your content, and a community of peers. Memberships provide recurring revenue and keep students engaged long-term, increasing their lifetime value.
4Live Events
Workshops, webinars, and intensives that provide concentrated learning experiences. These can serve as entry points for new students or premium upgrades for existing ones.
Premium Pricing Attracts Premium Students
There's a counterintuitive truth about course pricing: higher prices often lead to better outcomes. Students who invest more are more committed. They show up more consistently, do the work more diligently, and are more likely to achieve results.
Low-priced courses attract bargain hunters who may never engage with the content. Premium prices attract serious students who value transformation and are willing to invest in themselves.
This doesn't mean you should price people out of your courses. But it does mean you shouldn't race to the bottom. Find the price point where students are invested enough to take the work seriously.
Testing Your Pricing
How do you know if your pricing is right? Pay attention to these signals:
If everyone says yes immediately, you're probably underpriced. Some friction in the buying process is healthy—it means people are taking the investment seriously.
If no one says yes, you might be overpriced—or you might have a positioning problem. Before dropping your price, make sure you're communicating the transformation clearly.
If people say yes but don't complete the course, your price might actually be too low. They didn't invest enough to feel committed.
The sweet spot is when students feel the investment, complete the program, get results, and feel like they got more value than they paid for. That's when you know your pricing and your course are both working.
