Almost every woman I have watched start a service business has the same wound in the same place: pricing. She will build a genuinely good thing — design, coaching, consulting, copywriting, bookkeeping, whatever it is — and then quote a number so low it makes me wince, then apologise for even that. The skill was never the problem. The price was. And underpricing is not the safe, humble choice it feels like. It is the single fastest way to work yourself into exhaustion and resentment while convincing your best potential clients that you are not very good.
That last part deserves its own sentence, because it is the bit people refuse to believe. Price is a signal. When you charge far below the going rate, you are not being generous; you are telling the market that you belong at the bottom of it. The clients who only want the cheapest option are also, reliably, the most demanding, the slowest to pay and the quickest to disappear. You can build a business on them, but it will be a miserable one. Raising your prices does not just earn more per hour. It changes who shows up.
Why women underprice specifically
This is not a personality flaw and it is not a confidence-seminar problem to be fixed with affirmations. It is partly the same dynamic that drives the pay gap in employment, transplanted into self-employment, where there is no HR department or salary band to anchor against — just you and a blank quote, and a lifetime of being socialised to be accommodating. Studies of negotiation consistently find women are penalised more than men for assertiveness about money, which teaches a rational caution that then quietly sabotages the pricing conversation.
There is also the trap of pricing from your own budget rather than the client's value. You imagine what you would be willing to pay, and you flinch, and you quote that. But you are not your client. A business paying you to fix a problem is weighing your fee against what the problem costs them or what solving it earns them — a number that usually dwarfs whatever you would personally spend. Pricing from your own wallet is one of the most expensive mistakes there is.
What you are actually charging for
The mental shift that fixes more pricing problems than any formula is this: clients are not buying your hours. They are buying an outcome and the removal of a headache. When you frame your work as time, you invite an hourly negotiation you will usually lose, and you cap your income at the number of hours in a day. When you frame it as a result — the website that brings in leads, the books that survive a tax inspection, the brand that lets them charge more — the conversation moves to what that result is worth, which is a far larger and more honest number.
This is the case for pricing by project or by value rather than by the hour wherever you can. It also rewards you for getting better: the more skilled you become, the faster you deliver the outcome, and hourly billing perversely punishes that speed while value pricing rewards it. The hourly rate has its place for genuinely open-ended work, but as a default it quietly caps your business at your own stamina.
A sane way to actually set the number
- Find out what others at your level genuinely charge — ask peers directly, lurk in industry groups, look at published rates. Most underpricing survives purely on not knowing the real range.
- Work out the income you actually need, then divide by realistic billable hours — not 40 a week, more like half that once you account for admin, sales and the unpaid running of a business.
- Add the costs employment hid from you: your own pension, holiday, sick days, software, tax. A freelance rate that merely matches a salary leaves you poorer, because you are now funding all of that yourself.
- Then raise it, because your first instinct will still be too low. The number that makes you slightly uncomfortable to say out loud is usually close to right.
How to say it without flinching
The delivery matters as much as the number. State your price as a simple fact, then stop talking. The instinct is to rush in with justifications and discounts before the client has even responded — "but I could do it for less, or we could take something out" — which signals that you do not believe your own quote. Say the number. Let the silence sit. The silence is not rejection; it is the client thinking, and the person who speaks first to fill it usually loses.
And practise hearing no without collapsing the price. Some prospects will balk, and that is information, not a verdict on your worth. If everyone says yes immediately, you are too cheap. A healthy business has a steady trickle of people who decide you are not for them — that is the sound of a price set correctly, filtering for the clients who value what you do.
The counterpoint: when lower is the right strategy
I am not telling you to charge premium rates from day one regardless of reality. There are honest reasons to price lower for a while. When you are genuinely starting out and need portfolio pieces and testimonials, the work itself has value to you beyond the fee, and a lower introductory rate to build a body of evidence is a legitimate investment, not a failure of nerve. The mistake is not starting low. The mistake is staying low — letting the introductory rate calcify into your permanent rate because raising it feels frightening, and then resenting the clients who are only paying what you told them to.
So set an expiry date on your low prices, out loud, even if only to yourself. Decide that after the next three clients, or the next quarter, the rate goes up — and then actually do it, including with the existing clients who can absorb it. Your pricing should climb as your skill and your evidence do. The version of you a year from now will be better at this work and should be paid accordingly. Build that expectation in now, while it is just a number on a page, rather than discovering in two years that you have quietly trapped yourself at the bottom of your own market.