How do I price a service I've never offered before?

By Ask a Shop OwnerUpdated Pricing

Short answer

Cost plus a margin you'd be embarrassed to share, then adjust after ten jobs. New services should be more profitable than old ones, not less.

Start high

You don't know how long it'll take, what'll go wrong, or what materials cost when sourcing fails. Add a 30 to 50 percent buffer on top of your normal margin for the first ten.

Then revisit

After ten jobs, you'll know real time and real cost. Now you can price it correctly. If you started low, you've trained the market that this is a cheap service and you'll never recover.

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