How to price a paid video call with your audience

Almost every creator who decides to sell access to themselves gets stuck on the same question, and stays stuck on it for weeks: what do I charge? The honest answer is that the number matters much less than the shape of the offer. Get the shape right and a wide range of prices works. Get it wrong and no price does.

Short blocks beat long ones, almost always

The instinct is to sell an hour, because an hour feels like enough time to deliver something worthwhile. In practice an hour is the hardest thing you can sell. It asks your buyer to clear a calendar slot, commit to a large-feeling amount of money, and trust that a stranger will still be there when the time comes. Three separate reasons to close the tab.

Ten minutes asks for almost nothing. Ten minutes is a decision someone makes while standing in a queue. And ten minutes with a person you actually follow is not a lesser version of an hour — for most of what people want from creators (one question answered, one look at their work, one problem unstuck) it is the whole thing.

If you are unsure, sell the smallest block you would still be glad to show up for. You can always sell more of them.

Finding your first number

Three ways to land on a starting price, in order of how well they work:

1. Price against a substitute. What does your audience already pay for ten focused minutes of expert attention? A consultation, a lesson, a session. Take that hourly figure, divide it, and start there.
2. Price against your own reluctance. Name the number at which you would be genuinely pleased to be interrupted. Not tolerant — pleased. That number is usually right, because resentment leaks into a call and buyers hear it.
3. Price at ten dollars and watch. If you have no signal at all, ten is a good place to be wrong. It is low enough to be an impulse and high enough not to attract people who only want free things.

Raise it when the link disappears

The clean signal to raise your price is speed. If you share a link and it is claimed in under a minute, you are underpriced — you had more demand than you had supply, and the difference went into thin air rather than into your account. Put it up by half and share another one.

The reverse signal is slower and easier to misread. A link that goes unclaimed once is noise. A link that goes unclaimed three times in a row, shared to the same place at the same hour, is a price signal — or a timing one. Change one variable at a time.

Why the extension is where the money is

The most common pattern in short paid calls is that the buyer wants more once they are in. They arrived nervous, spent two minutes finding their footing, and by minute eight they are just getting to the good part. If buying five more minutes takes a tap and no second checkout, a meaningful share of calls extend. If it takes a new payment form, almost none do.

This is why PRESNT keeps the extension on the same stored payment method and puts the button next to the countdown, right when the clock starts to matter. The design job is to remove every reason to say "that's fine, we should wrap up."

Free is a strategy, not a failure

Setting a price of zero for a run of calls is a perfectly good way to start. It gives you reps, it tells you what people actually ask for, and it produces the thing you cannot manufacture: people who have talked to you and will say so. Run free blocks for a week, notice which requests you enjoyed, and price the next week around those.

The pricing mistakes that cost the most

• Tiering too early. Three price points before you have had thirty calls is three ways to confuse people. One price, one length.
• Charging for availability instead of attention. If you sell a scheduled slot, you are selling a calendar. If you sell "I am live right now," you are selling presence, which is worth more and costs you less.
• Apologising in the copy. "Only $10!" reads as doubt. State the price and the length and stop talking.

A starting configuration that works

If you want to skip the deliberation entirely: $10, ten minutes, shared to your story when you happen to have twenty free minutes, with one sentence saying what you will help with. Do that six times. You will know your real price by the end of it, and you will have been paid to find out.