Pricing your studio: a calm guide

Pricing anxiety is endemic in small studios. The fear of charging too much (and losing the work) competes with the fear of charging too little (and building a business that can't sustain itself). Both fears are reasonable. Neither is useful.

Here is a calm, practical guide to pricing a studio.

Start with capacity, not market rate

Market rate research is valuable but it tells you what others charge, not what you should charge. Start with your capacity: how many days per month can you actually do client work, accounting for admin, sales, and the non-client time any healthy practice requires?

Now price from that number. If you can do 15 client days per month and you need £8,000/month to run the studio, you need to charge at least £533/day — probably more, because not every month will be fully sold.

The market rate tells you whether your number is viable. The capacity calculation tells you what your number needs to be.

Fixed vs hourly

Hourly billing is the default and it's the wrong default for most agency work. It creates an incentive to be slow, puts the risk of your own inefficiency onto the client, and makes budgeting impossible for them.

Fixed-fee pricing flips the incentive: the faster and more efficiently you work, the more profitable the engagement. It also forces a clarity of scope that hourly billing lets you defer indefinitely.

The exception: engagements where the scope genuinely cannot be defined in advance. Ongoing advisory work, retainers with variable scope. These are better priced on a day-rate or monthly fee.

When to raise your prices

The simplest signal: if you're winning more than two-thirds of the proposals you send, your prices are too low. A healthy win rate for a well-positioned studio is somewhere between one-third and half. Below that, something is wrong with either the positioning or the pricing. Above two-thirds, you're leaving money on the table.

Raise prices in small increments on new proposals. You'll know quickly whether the market agrees.

The confidence problem

Most studios that undercharge do so because they're not sure they're worth more. The answer to this is not a mindset shift. It's evidence: do the work, deliver good outcomes, document them clearly, raise the price, see what happens.

Pricing confidence is earned, not assumed.