by Jonathan van Geuns, June 30, 2025
Thereâs something tender and charged about talking money in the world of coaching. Tender, because coaching so often begins in care, like a gesture, a belief in anotherâs becoming. Charged, because care now has a price. The moment money enters the room, the temperature shifts. Trail running coaching, like many adjacent fields has quietly absorbed the logics of an economic system: monthly retainers, packages, âinvest in yourselfâ language. We're told to âcharge what youâre worth.â What I hardly hear is that pricing changes the relationship: it shapes how care is offered. It impacts who feels welcome, or a burden, who gets to linger, and who disappears when money runs out.
This essay is not an indictment of charging for coaching. We all need to survive, including myself. Itâs not a call to martyrdom or free labor. I mean it as a call to pause and ask what weâre reproducing when we uncritically inherit pricing models; what we lose when we fold this deeply human, relational, improvisational practice, into a model built for efficiency, deliverables, and scale. What follows is not just about cost, itâs about culture. I put myself to the test to see if I can create some answers, and to see how I can do better myself.
Before we talk about pricing we should probably talk about what it does to coaches. Little is said about the psychological toll. The way the soul bends for some under the weight of a PayPal request. Coaching is intimate work: itâs not just planning. Itâs witnessing, holding uncertainty, listening to whatâs not said, and presence. And presence like that takes time, energy, emotional bandwidth, and attention that bleeds beyond the working day. We carry clients with us everywhere. This invisible labor rarely gets accounted for.
Over time, something does shift. Coaches start protecting their energy with suspicion. They flinch when a client asks for more, not necessarily because they donât want to give, but because giving too much feels like mismanagement. The rate becomes the measure of value. A full roster becomes validation. Tiredness becomes proof of commitment. A coach adapts, gets better at charging, enforces boundaries, increases efficiency, and often, quietly, worse at tenderness and grace.
Worth was never meant to be measured in billable hours. Research tells us what the industry wonât: unrecognized, emotional labor becomes burnout; compassion, when always outbound and never replenished, becomes fatigue; holding trauma, grief, transition, without time to metabolize it, erodes your sense of self, and; precarity, when chronic, starts to feel like personal failure. When coaching is priced like a product, coaches are expected to perform like a producer. Which brings us to the bigger picture.
What other industries reveal and the broken systems of trail/ultra running coaching
Before we can reimagine pricing, we have to name whatâs not working. We canât fix what we wonât face, and right now, coaching is replicating more than itâs resisting. It borrows from business consulting, repackages therapy, echoes startup culture, and inherits extractive norms of wellness markets. âCareâ priced like capital is never neutral. It changes how trust flows. Who feels safe. How much silence youâre allowed. What kind of growth counts as âworth it.â Coaching has absorbed the aesthetics of intimacy but often runs on the engine of transaction.
This isnât about blaming coaches. Most of us are improvising inside a broken system, trying to offer something real while being asked to brand, price, sell, and scale it. When the pricing model begins to shape the very nature of the relationship, something intimate begins to fray. So before we imagine whatâs possible, letâs be honest about whatâs happening.
Trail/ultra coaching is not exempt from this fraying. It increasingly mirrors systems that were never built for it. It mimics private therapy without the infrastructure, tech startups without the scaling laws, luxury wellness without the lineage of care. Most coaches are freelancers and many lack insurance, pensions, paid leave, or support.
To survive, some raise their rates out of precarity. A $250/month coaching plan isnât always about transformation. A runner working a service job might pay 15% of their income for this. another wealthy runner pays the same and gets the same plan. That context is rarely named. Clients think theyâre paying for elite service, when often theyâre subsidizing an unsupported labor economy. This is flat-rate inequity and a systemic failure of care.
Anyways, to further understand whatâs broken, we need to look sideways, across the fence, into the adjacent fields where care and capital already collide, often disastrously. Coaching doesnât exist in isolation. Its pricing echo those of therapy, education, art, and spiritual work. Each industry offers a reflection.
In private-pay therapy, healing wears a heavy price tag. Systems built on 1-to-1 care without public infrastructure inevitably excludes those who most need to be seen. Coaching borrows this model and its inequities. The lack of licensure magnifies that dynamic. Without institutional scaffolding or public subsidy, coaches price themselves into legitimacy. Expensiveness becomes a proxy for trustworthiness. All the while, some of the most insightful, community-rooted guides are priced out of their own wisdom.
The artist knows this well. They pour themselves into a piece of art, then must justify its worth with metrics and sales (and likes, follows) . Coaches are expected to justify their work through their own sacrifice, to make invisible labor visible, at the risk of becoming another site of optimization. Even the transmission of knowledge is compromised. Most crafts rely on apprenticeship. Todayâs coaching economy skips integration in favor of income. Potential apprentices are turned into entrepreneurs before theyâve even digested what theyâve learned. We donât make room for shadowing or the wisdom of waiting.
What began as deep companionship is now a multi-billion dollar industry shaped by branding, scale, and entrepreneurial logic. As Rina Raphael wrote: âWellness culture has confused healing with optimization. The self is no longer something to accept, but something to monetize.â That logic has seeped into coaching at every level. Whatâs broken in pricing isnât just the amount. Itâs what the system silently rewards and excludes, what it forces coaches to become in order to survive. These arenât just economic questions.
Individualized, high-touch, high-cost services are paid monthly or per session. This positions a coach as a luxury good rather than a shared or necessary support. The runner is a client and becomes the product. The self becomes a brand. Care becomes content. The pricing model becomes extractive. Some coaches act like remote CEOs of a client's body, sending data requests and check-in forms, with little inquiry into anything else. Training is broken into blocks. Bodies into biometrics. But a runner is not a product. And coaching is not a product.
More so, the rise of âpremiumâ coaching tiers reflects the wellness industry's class divide. Pricing support as a luxury experience reproduces classism, treats vulnerability as something to be monetized, and rewards exclusivity over impact. This isnât about saying high-fee coaching is never appropriate. But what happens when the most supported coaching is only available to the affluent? Trail running, a sport that already skews white and wealthy, becomes even less accessible, through coaching support that acts as a gatekeeper to growth.
Coaching also is fast becoming a two-tiered economy. On one side a $+250/month elite programs, and on the other, mass-market, algorithm-based coaching apps: âaffordable,â efficient and template-driven. The middle is disappearing. My fear is that this creates a growing divide: one group gets relational coaching, reflection, emotional support, the other gets mostly metrics, perhaps macros, and semi-personalized spreadsheets. We are replicating in coaching what we see in education and healthcare: concierge services for the wealthy, austerity for the rest. Trail running doesnât need another class divide.
Coaches often have two choices: (1) be a gatekeeper and hold strict boundaries around time and cost, serving those who can pay the rate, or; (2) be a martyr and undervalue your labor, give away time freely, and eventually burn out. Both are distortions. Gatekeepers sever relationships that might grow. Martyrs drain themselves in systems that do not nourish. Both are symptoms of pricing models that isolate the coach instead of embedding them in collective structures of care, redistribution, and support.
Many coaches price their services like a SaaS product: monthly access, deliverables, customer support. I believe coaching is NOT a service; a flat rate with fixed deliverables. Seeing it as a service flattens what coaching is: a relationship, with presence. A human process. By treating it like a subscription box or a tech service, we incentivize output over attunement, collapse presence into deliverables, and reward scalability over sustainability. Runners start to internalize this. They feel guilty if they donât âuseâ their coach enough that month. Or feel shortchanged if they donât get faster. The relationship becomes transactional, not transformational.
Pricing assumes clarity about whatâs exchanged, while thatâs often emergent. Commodified coaching asks you to define the âvalueâ up front. It treats clarity as a prerequisite: whatâs the package, return on investment, expected shift? Oftentimes a client doesnât know what theyâre here for until months in. Sometimes what changes isnât what they came to change. Or coaching shapes one into someone who no longer needs it. Thatâs not mission drift, thatâs emergence. Rigid pricing denies this, it demands clarity too early and forecloses discovery.
Money itself can be a boundary. âThis is what I charge. This is what you get.â Clarity is not the same as care. Pricing becomes a way to avoid relationship rather than deepen it. We outsource boundary-setting to a number instead of learning how to have a relationship âMy time is valuable,â but what if the relationship itself is valuable; unpredictably, unevenly, beautifully so? This doesnât mean we erase boundaries. It means we build them through ongoing relational consent.
In commodified coaching, care is something a coach offers, like a cup of water. Real coaching is transformative only when care reconstitutes who you are: how you listen, show up, breathe when someone else is afraid. That kind of care isnât scalable and slow. It emerges from a lifetime of paying attention. Itâs degraded by models that ask, âWhat are you offering this month?â instead of âWho are you becoming through this relationship?â
Critical pedagogy reminds us that real learning or growth is non-linear, uncertain, recursive, messy, and deeply contextual. Especially in trail/ultra running, where coaching often touches thresholds of identity and meaning. You donât plan epiphany. You donât schedule spiritual readiness. So when we price as if we know, as if care is a commodity with guaranteed return, weâre colonizing the mystery. Coaching is not a vending machine. It's a shared path through the woods. Sometimes you get lost. Sometimes thatâs the point.
Trust in coaching comes slowly, suddenly, unevenly. It can take months to unfold. Pricing contracts often impose a timeline of expectation: three months to see change, six months to build momentum, 16 weeks to get ready for a marathon. This creates subtle coercion: trust must perform on time, change must arrive on schedule, and emotion must fit within the window. When it doesnât, is it still âworkingâ? But what if the process is still becoming?
When pricing is rigid and vertically structured, runners begin to act like consumers: âI paid for this, whereâs my result?â or âI canât ask for too much; Iâm not on the âpremiumâ tier.â Coaching is not a Netflix subscription. Pricing models that separate people into tiers undermine the horizontal, mutual ethic running thrives on. On race day, no one asks your pricing tier. Why should coaching feel any different?
Pricing also trains clients to see themselves as projects, not people. When coaching is priced around outcomes, clients begin to internalize the logic of productivity: âAm I improving fast enough? Have I justified this investment? Am I being coached well, or just being a difficult case?â Runners see themselves not as complex humans, but as projects to be managed. They coach toward output, not toward wholeness. And the more expensive, the more pressure to âtransform.â
The idea that higher prices mean higher value, also makes lower-income runners feel like theyâre settling for less, or not âcommittedâ enough to justify investing in themselves. This is a coercive psychological trick borrowed from elite business: If you wonât spend $250/month to âbecome the athlete you were born to be,â are you even serious? In reality, pricing does not always reflect quality. It reflects: market positioning, confidence in sales, and a coachâs social capital and visibility. This mindset normalizes exclusion and shames economic precarity, while disguising it as âempowerment.â
Furthermore, high-priced coaches often attract more visibility, elite athletes, and attention. Not necessarily because theyâre better, but because price confers perceived legitimacy. Sociologists call this closed loop a cycle of cultural capital: high fees signal value, value attracts high-status clients, these clients raise the coachâs prestige, and this justifies the high fee. Merit becomes indistinguishable from market power. Itâs unjust and epistemically wrong, because some of the most intuitive, caring, grounded coaches get priced out of credibility.
When we rely on pricing as the arbiter of legitimacy, we reinforce the idea that those who charge the most are also the most âserious.â Everyone else becomes a hobbyist. This binary erases: those who offer mentorship as a practice of lineage, volunteer coaches powered by trust, not fees, or community organizers who pace, coach, and care deeply. It also makes it harder to critique harmful but highly paid coaches. Their pricing becomes a kind of armor. In truth, pricing is not an indicator of depth, ethics, or effectiveness. It is often an indicator of visibility, privilege, and marketing fluency.
Traditional pricing assumes value flows in one direction: from coach to client. In practice, many runners: share emotional labor, refer friends, build community around the coachâs name, and offer gifts, stories, trust, and time. These are relational economies, and they often go unpaid, unrecognized, and unreciprocated. Pricing models that only count money erase the other currencies people contribute: presence, reciprocity, storytelling, lineage, laughter. There is no space in this model for mutual aid, sliding scales, barter, or gifts. Even though these are foundational to most community-based care traditions.
In some circles, athletes get hooked on coaching, because they feel they canât trust themselves without it. Our pricing models quietly reinforces this with monthly charges as âconstant presence.â Results become the fix. The coach becomes the regulator and validator. The risk is that dependency turns into emotional outsourcing. Coaches, especially those under financial pressure, are rarely incentivized to help clients become self-sufficient. Why would you teach someone to walk away from the thing you charge for? Itâs not always intentional, but itâs reality.
Without a clear definition of âenoughâ pricing tends toward inflation. Many coaches raise prices âas they grow,â because growth itself is coded as moral and necessary. But what if your rate is already enough? What if more clients isnât better? What if thereâs a ceiling not imposed by scarcity, but by integrity? A pricing model without a theology of enough will always tilt toward expansion, never reflection.
Grace, true, unearned, tender generosity requires spaciousness. It requires the ability to show up not because someone paid, but because they matter. Pricing structures crowd out grace. They leave no room for wild generosity, no impulse to stay longer on a call, or to write a note, or to just witness someoneâs truth without thinking: Am I being paid for this? When every gesture is part of a deliverable, grace dies. Without grace, coaching loses its poetry.
In most pricing systems, presence is sliced presence into portions: one call per month (if at all) and âunlimited check-insâ (but really, not too many). It assumes presence is measurable, divisible, linear. Coaching doesnât work like that. Presence is uneven: sometimes it floods, sometimes itâs a heartbeat on the other end of a message. When we price presence as a unit, we break the ecology of attunement. We no longer arrive when weâre most needed, we arrive when the calendar says we should.
The body does not grow in billing cycles. Grief does not resolve in one Zoom a month. No one has healed by âmaking the most of their package.â Standardized pricing (monthly, quarterly, per-session) forces unnatural rhythms onto a practice that is seasonal, energetic, and relational. In running, we know this intuitively: like, you rest after long races. In coaching, we impose industrial rhythms: same rate, same availability, same expectations, regardless of what season someone we are in.
This is chrononormativity: the capitalist belief that growth should be measurable, regular, fast. We need pricing that honors real rhythms: the rise and fall of energy, identity, aliveness. Under current models, thatâs when the container ends. What if thatâs exactly when coaching begins? What if you could say: "Iâll stay with you anyway." No invoice or expiration, just presence. Current pricing often cuts the relationship at the moment itâs most needed. It asks coaches to turn away, when the human thing is to stay. In most models, rest has no economic value.
Similarly, silence is suspicious. If a client doesnât check in, theyâre seen as disengaged. If a coach doesnât respond quickly, theyâre unprofessional. If a lull occurs in the process, someone worries theyâre not âgetting value.â Silence is often the soil where insight germinates. Runners need time to metabolize. Coaches need time to listen inwardly. Relationships need room to breathe. Pricing, especially flat-rate, high-expectation pricing, treats silence like failure.
On the trail, silence can be sacred. In coaching, it can be too. So what happens when someone disappears for a while, not ghosting, just metabolizing? Pricing models treat absence as disconnection. In many cultures, absence is valued. It is time to tend the inner world. Capitalism calls it disengagement. Coaching platforms call it churn. Invoices call it cancellation. We need models that honor people who come and go like weather. That too, is commitment.
When a runner pays $250/month, thereâs often a subtle pressure to justify the expense: log every run, show improvement, and âhave something to show for it.â This creates a performative arc of transformation, where athletes feel pressure to deliver a narrative of growth that fits the container of the contract. Real change doesnât always look like success. Sometimes it looks like collapse. Or like stillness. Sometimes it looks like quitting the race you thought you were running. Rigid pricing makes it harder to say:" Iâm not better, but Iâm different." Thatâs a tragedy.
Clients donât grow in predictable arcs. Life interrupts. Grief knocks the wind out. Some weeks are about hitting paces, others are about learning to run again after trauma or postpartum. Pricing doesnât flex for that. Most models offer: same cost, even when a runner canât train that month, no built-in pause or recalibration, and no container for grief. Instead, thereâs an implicit pressure to âuse the timeâ to get something out of it, even when your body or spirit is just trying to survive. This turns healing into a performance, rather than a practice.
Coaching is deeply asynchronous and emotional. A single sentence from a client (âI think I donât want to run this race after allâ) may take the coach hours of reflection to sit with before responding wisely. A single session may echo for weeks in a runnerâs life. Some grow with less contact. Standard pricing models treat coaching as if it were consulting: fixed inputs yield fixed outputs. This reduces the unpredictable, spiritual, cyclical nature of personal transformation into an hourly wage model with performance metrics. It forces coaches to track âvalueâ in ways that distort the actual work, where the most powerful moment may be a single line of insight, born of silence, trust, and time.
Coaches too often carry clients in their mind between sessions: thinking of them on runs, adjusting plans late at night, reading about a topic because a client casually mentioned it. Coaching plans rarely account for this unseen, unbillable labor. But it is real energetic care. Itâs unacknowledged in linear pricing models that reduce coaching to âfour emails and one call a month.â Clients who need more holding are sometimes seen as âhigh-maintenanceâ unless theyâre on the âunlimited contactâ tier. Maybe itâs not the client whoâs asking too much. Maybe itâs the model thatâs not big enough to hold what coaching actually is.
In many traditions, mentorship, healing, and guidance are offered through ceremony or kinship. They mark thresholds, rites of passage, seasonal turning points, not deliverables. Coaching, especially for runners navigating life transitions, often resembles ritual more than routine: a first 100-miler as a coming-of-age, returning to the trail after loss, or letting go of an identity that no longer fits. Flat-rate pricing treats all moments the same. Month one, month five, same rate. We flatten the sacred by forcing ritual into capitalist rhythms.
Much of what we share in coaching isnât proprietary. Itâs not invented but inherited. When we monetize that knowledge without context, consent, or reciprocity, we are extracting from lineages we didnât steward. Pricing creates the illusion of ownership over truths that were gifted. This doesnât mean we canât charge for our labor. It does mean we must ask: Is this mine to sell? If not, what other forms of accountability or redistribution are needed?
Moreover, coaches are standing on the shoulders of others: teachers who never charged us, athletes who taught us by trusting us, cultural practices that shaped our instincts, communities that gave us the language to witness. When we price as if we are discrete, self-contained vessels of value, we erase our lineage, and privatize what was not meant to be owned. Pricing assumes a discrete coach, but accountability would ask: How do you honor the line that made you possible? What portion of your income do you owe, not as charity, but as debt repaid to community?
We also price as if it is a private journey and the the coach as the central agent of change. One runner, one coach, one transaction. Yet most transformation is interdependent: the runnerâs friends hold them accountable, a group text provides relief mid-training block, a podcast sparks a mindset shift, or another athleteâs courage ripples through. Pricing rarely reflects that web. Instead, it isolates growth into a 1-on-1 economy, when it is in truth a shared choreography of many hands and voices.
We coach in community, whether we admit it or not. Besides, every runner on the trail is already being coached, by the terrain, weather, distance, their body. Runners are in dialogue with difficulty, resilience, with what breaks and what doesnât. Coaching is not giving runners something they donât have. Itâs joining runners in the conversation. Pricing turns this into a proprietary relationship: âI gave you this mindset.â âI helped you unlock this.â That framing erases the rest. Itâs a deep distortion.
David Roche often mentions how much he loves everyone. Too much and cringe? Whatever you think about him, pricing models (transactional by nature) can make it awkward, even taboo, to name love within coaching. Instead we call it âsupport,â âguidance,â âaccountability.â Sometimes what we do really mean is: âI see you. I believe in you. I love you.â Pricing doesnât forbid this, but it shapes the container in such a way that love becomes riskier to name, because once money is involved, weâre not sure where the boundaries are. Coaching becomes smaller than it was ever meant to be.
Pricing systems, left unchecked, train coaches to see value through extraction. We start calculating ROI on a conversation. We withhold presence unless billable. We feel resentful of âneedyâ runners, when really, the container is just too small for what theyâre carrying. Over time, our inner compass begins to warp. We start measuring our worth by how well we enforce boundaries, upsell, or âscale.â We forget how to give freely. We forget how to receive non-monetary forms of trust. We forget, slowly, what the work was ever for. We stay silent, because weâve been taught that unbilled care is unsustainable. Thatâs the real theft: the dulling of spontaneous generosity.
Coaches hold futures. They witness possibilities before the runner can articulate them. They believe in lives the athlete hasnât yet lived into. Thatâs visionary labor. Being a timekeeper for someone elseâs becoming. That kind of holding doesnât fit on an invoice. Itâs invisible. So, in pricing models, it vanishes, deemed soft, extra, irrelevant. Itâs often the most radical gift we offer.
In the end, maybe the most radical critique is this: pricing makes coaching too small. It tries to fold something sacred, unpredictable and human into an economic frame not made for it. It puts a number where a story should go. It replaces belonging with access. It makes us a little lonelier. We need pricing models that remember the bigness, the organic and weirdness of the work. We need ways to coach that feel like building a home. That requires a different kind of accounting, one measured in depth, reciprocity, the aliveness we leave in our wake.
Hereâs the truth no invoice shows: the most powerful moment, the most honest labor might be the silence you held without rushing to fill it. The most dangerous cost isnât time or money, itâs the slow erosion of our capacity to stay human in a world that asks us to be efficient. If we want to coach with heart, we need pricing that honors the heart's labor. So what if pricing didnât ask you to choose between care and survival? What if the structure of your rates protected your energy rather than hollowed it out? What if pricing could hold both generosity and sustainability in choreography?
Core principles for reimagining coaching pricing
Now that weâve done the hard work of naming the harms, letâs surface principles that any future pricing ideally should hold, if it is to be coherent with our critique. These following 15 principles emerged from a iterative inquiry into what might be possible. I began by mapping more than dozens of critiques drawn from lived experience, analysis, and adjacent fields. I distilled them into a relational compass: principles that honor presence, justice, pacing, etc. This is not a model to copy per se, but a way to ask better questions about what we make possible through price.
1. Price as relationship, not transaction. Coaching is a relationship, one that lives in silence, joy, rupture, stillness. Presence isnât a deliverable and care isnât quantifiable. Coaching isnât scalable without distortion. Price accordingly. and refuse the subscription mindset.
2. Let pricing be a conversation. Wield pricing not as a boundary, but let it be porous, relational, revisitable, something to return to together as seasons, needs, and truths shift. Pricing can protect and invite.
3. Honor presence & trust the pace. Donât tie value to output. Coaching is often invisible, metabolizing beneath the surface. Some leap, others linger or loop back. A quiet month isnât a failure, it may be the work. Price in a way that allows for slowness, silence, return. Let the calendar breathe.
4. Price for companionship & rhythms of re-attunement. Not everyone wants fixing. Some want company. Not every client needs a full arc or transformation. That, too, is coaching. Clients grow and coaches change. Build rituals to check in, on money and on meaning. Let pricing evolve alongside the relationship.
5. Let meaning outweigh optimization. Not every offering needs to be profitable. Some things, like an essay, matter because they touch someone. Let pricing reflect meaning, not just metrics. Scarcity and urgency tactics (like âlimited spots availableâ) distorts care. Let pricing offer steadiness, not pressure.
6. Price for emergence, not certainty. The most powerful coaching moments often canât be predicted. Create containers, not contracts. Leave room for surprise.
7. Price with seasonality in mind. Allow for sabbaticals, slower months, rest. Performance includes pause; let pricing models include downtime without guilt.
8. Trust the value of absence. Disappearance isnât disengagement. They may be metabolizing. Stillness isnât failure; let pricing and presence hold space for that.
9. Design flexible entryways. Ditch rigid tiers. Clarity is helpful, but complexity is human. Build constellations: one-off sessions, deep dives, sliding scales; let people arrive in the way their life allows.
10. Price for responsiveness, not volume. Coaching isnât portioned into 1 hour units. Some need more one month, less the next. Price to stay available without tracking every drop.
11. Make space for grace & generosity. Grace isnât billable, but it is essential. Leave space in pricing to follow a hunch, write the extra note, stay a little longer. Give sustainably, with formal pathways: gifted slots, mentorships, mutual aid, so generosity doesnât become depletion.
12. Price from wholeness & integration. Set rates from needs, not fear. If you're hustling , every client becomes a savior or a threat. Build from steadiness, if possible. Emotional labor doesnât end when the session does. Leave time to metabolize, rest, return whole.
13. Price with completion in mind. Not everyone is meant to stay. Offer one-offs, goodbyes, gentle exits. Some clients are passersby, not prospects. Let them go with dignity, not penalty.
14. Name power & embed dignified redistribution. Every price holds power. Whoâs excluded? Whoâs centered? Use models (like sliding scales) that shifts the balance. Let dignity move both ways. When someone pays less, let them offer something in return. This isn't charity, this a conversation between equals.
15. Acknowledge your sources & give forward. Coaching is never solo work. Price in a way that honors the unseen teachers, communities, lineages that shaped the coaching, and give them their due.
What could pricing look like?
We donât need another clever package. We do need a different perspective. I like to believe that, at its best, coaching is not an industry. Itâs a weaving of time, trust, terrain. A long conversation that sometimes goes quiet, or rushes, turns strange or hopeful. We forget the companionship. Pricing shapes how we keep that promise of relationship. Over time, it tells us who we are, not just as coaches, but as people.
The real question all this time isnât how much coaching should cost. But what kinds of relationships weâre pricing into being? What makes those relationships durable, for everyone? What kind of care our pricing invites or excludes? How we want to show up, and who we want to stay for? What kind of world are you pricing coaching into?
The best pricing models for coaching donât just balance budgets, they honor complexity, invite reciprocity, resist extraction, and protect presence. They are alive: responsive to season, attuned to each relationship, structured enough to hold care without collapsing into chaos. They donât all look the same. The ones I found, the most ethical, durable, relationally intelligent, often share a few features:
1. Constellation models. Instead of rigid tiers, offer a flexible landscape of entry points: one-off deep sessions; seasonal companionship; sabbatical pricing; low-frequency anchor coaching; group circles; mentorship pods; mutual aid or âgiftedâ spots; high-presence but low-frequency plans. Clients find themselves in the map. Not everything is custom, but everything is flexible.
2. Reciprocity-based sliding scales. Rather than fixed discounts or quiet accommodation, sliding scales are offered with dignity and reciprocity. You might say: âIf the top of the scale isnât accessible, youâre welcome to choose another rate. In return, I invite you to consider how you might honor the work, through story, amplification, resource-sharing, or another form that feels right.â A coach is not a martyr, nor a charity. Believe in mutual dignity, not silent depletion.
3. Client choice & agency in payment. Let people choose their payment rhythm, for example: monthly, quarterly, or by session; suggested ranges instead of fixed rates, or; option to prepay when abundant, or pause when needed.
4. Pay-it-forward tiers & community funds. Some choose to pay more to support others. Make these funds visible, not hidden; through community-supported options, subsidized sessions, or shared impact reports. Coaching becomes a micro-ecosystem of redistribution.
5. Value-led anchoring + seasonal review. Set rates based on your needs, capacity, values; material needs, emotional bandwidth, desired number of clients, or commitment to spaciousness, grace, and generosity. Revisit pricing ritually, not reactively, with clients if needed. Make space for mis-attunement: offer repair for ruptures, clarify that leaving is okay, and that youâll stay in integrity either way.
6. Make space for completion pathways, not retention tactics. Design for healthy endings: optional completion sessions to close with dignity, built-in review points where you both ask, âDo we keep going?â or gentle, shame-free exit language.
7. Gifting & grace built in. Create formal pathways for unbillable care: gifted sessions for rupture or transition, open-ended check-ins, flex weeks, completion sessions, or flex weeks as not to burn out. Generosity is part of the design.
8. Low-burn infrastructure. The best models protect energy and donât tie your worth to a weekly deliverable. Avoid the subscription trap. Allow for white space in your calendar, for rest, grief, repair, and creative cycles that sustain the work.
9. Invisible infrastructure for care. Not everything has to be visible or billed. Create quiet structures that hold the work, like space in your week for spontaneous outreach or emotional processing, time for emotional processing, or clear limits around what you can sustainably offer.
10. Explicit acknowledgment of lineage. Name the teachers, communities, lineages that shaped you and the coaching; into your website, onboarding, or practice documents. This could be a section naming your influences, teachers, and communities. Consider a tithe or donation.
The âbestâ pricing model is not one-size-fits-all. But if youâve read this far, youâre probably not interested in a plug-and-play template anyways. Youâre also looking for something more meaningful. Above all, a model that lets you love the coaching, stay in integrity, and live inside your values. Pricing is not just a number, itâs a signal and a stand. Itâs a story we tell about what matters.
In the end, weâre not just pricing coaching. Weâre setting the terms for how deeply we care, how much we can listen, how long we can stay, how generously we can give. While we may not always have perfect models, we do have choices. Choices that shape the texture of our relationships, the culture of our coaching, and the kind of world we make possible. We can let pricing reflect not what the market expects, but what the relationship deserves.
If this essay stirred something in you (curiosity, discomfort, recognition) consider it an invitation. Whether you're a coach, a client, or someone in between: start a conversation about pricing that holds tenderness and truth. Revisit your own models, not just for sustainability, but for coherence with your values. Name your lineage, your needs, what youâre no longer willing to reproduce. Experiment, with rhythms, reciprocity, rest. Thereâs no perfect model. But there is a more human one.
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