How to Build a Price List for Your Services

A service price list is the written record of what you sell, with a price and a unit of measure for every line: the hour, the day, the item, the monthly retainer, the fixed-fee project. You build it in four moves: list the work you repeat, pick a unit for each line, set the price from your full cost and your real delivery time, and write the terms that make the price valid. It is not about publishing prices: it exists so every quote starts from the same numbers instead of the memory of whoever writes it.

If every quote you send today is last week's quote with the figures nudged by eye, by the end of this guide you will have a usable price list, a way to keep it current, and a way to apply it to offers.

What you need before you start

• A list of what you actually sold over the last twelve months, pulled from invoices or accepted quotes. Not what you can do: what people bought.
• The costs behind a piece of work: the hourly cost of whoever delivers it, direct costs (materials, licences, travel) and the share of fixed overheads every billable hour has to carry.
• Real delivery time, not estimated time. If a job was quoted at six hours and took nine for three clients in a row, the true number is nine.
• A decision on who is allowed to deviate: who can discount, up to what percentage, and who signs off beyond that. Without this rule the price list is decorative within a fortnight.
• One place where the list lives, and where quote lines are pulled from. In Flusia that is the catalogue of products and services with their prices, which feeds quote management directly.

How to create a price list for services, step by step

1. List the work you actually sell. Open the last fifty invoice lines and group them by type. The list will be shorter than you expect: eight or ten items usually cover most of your revenue. That is the backbone of your price list.

2. Give every line a unit of measure. This is the step most price lists skip, and the one that causes the arguments later. Every row has to say what the price buys: an hour, a day, an item, a month, a closed project. "Consulting: 800 euro" is not a price list line. "Strategy consulting, one day of 8 hours: 800 euro" is.

3. Work out the fully loaded cost of an hour. Take a person's annual cost (salary, contributions, tools), divide it by the hours that are sellable in a year rather than by calendar hours, and add the share of overheads that hour has to carry. That gives you the floor, below which a sale costs you money.

4. Measure the real time each line takes. For fixed-fee work this is the only way to avoid pricing blind. Pull the actual duration of your recent jobs: if a brochure website has averaged 34 hours against 25 quoted, price it on 34.

5. Set the list price, not the minimum price. The list carries the full price, the one a new client pays with no special terms. If you write the discounted figure there, the first discount request puts you under cost. Now each line has two numbers: the published price and the floor.

6. Write what is in and what is out. Two lines per item: what it covers and what it does not. This is the part that prevents most disputes at delivery, and it carries over almost word for word into your offers, as covered in the guide on how to write a professional quote.

7. Set discounts as a rule, not case by case. Three parameters are enough: the maximum percentage, who can grant it, and in exchange for what (volume, payment up front, a multi-year commitment). A discount traded for something is a commercial term. A discount handed over to close faster is a wrong list price.

8. Load the list where your offers are written. It only works if, when you write a quote, the lines arrive with description, unit and price already filled in and you just pick quantities. It is also how discounts stay recorded per line instead of vanishing into a total.

How to set prices for services: three criteria

There is no single method, but three logics that coexist in the same list, each suited to a different kind of line.

Criterion	How it works	Where it fits
Cost plus margin	fully loaded cost of the hour or the job, plus the margin you want	repeatable work: maintenance, installations, support hours
Value to the client	what the outcome is worth to them, regardless of your hours	consulting, creative projects, work that unblocks a situation
Market reference	the band that kind of service normally sits in	standardised items, where clients compare prices easily

The practical rule: cost plus margin gives you the floor, value gives you the ceiling, the market reference tells you how much explaining your number will take.

Volume tiers and separate lists per client or channel

A single-price list works until volume shows up. When it does you need tiers: the same line changes unit price above a certain quantity. Social content management, for instance, might sit at 45 euro per post up to 10 posts a month, 38 euro from 11 to 30, and 32 euro above 30. Write the tier down, or it becomes an improvised discount every time somebody asks for a lot.

Separate price lists are a different thing again, and they earn their keep when channels have different cost structures: the end-client price, the reseller price, the price under a framework agreement. If the agency Vetrina Blu brings you work every month and costs you almost no selling time, a dedicated list is easier to run than a discount renegotiated every order. Remember that each extra list is maintenance: two or three stay tidy, eight do not.

If you work with agents or introducers there is a knock-on effect, because commission is usually calculated on a base that depends on the applied price and the discount granted, as covered in the guide on calculating sales commissions for agents.

The price list in a spreadsheet: when it is enough

Your first price list works perfectly well in a spreadsheet. Eight columns do the job: code, description, unit, price, cost, margin calculated automatically, notes on what is included, date of last review.

It stops being enough at three symptoms. Several copies of the file are circulating and nobody knows which one counts. Quotes get written by copying rows by hand, so typos reach the client. And nobody can say what average price a line sold at this year, because offers live in folders rather than a searchable archive.

From there it pays to keep the list where the offers are, so a price change applies to everyone immediately and every sold line stays on record. It is the reasoning behind the guide on managing quotes without spreadsheets, applied one level down: before the document, the numbers inside it.

How to keep the price list current

An unreviewed price list ages quietly, and the only thing that notices is your margin. A full review once a year plus a quick check each quarter is a sustainable rhythm.

In the full review you look at four things: how costs have moved, real average time on fixed-fee items against what you quoted, which lines sit below your margin threshold, and what discounts were actually granted. That last one is the most useful and the most neglected: if a line goes out discounted in 80 per cent of cases, the list price is not ambitious, it is wrong. Reading it needs an archive of offers with amounts and discounts, which is what feeds your sales reports. The quarterly check is lighter: new items born in the field, and costs you already know have changed.

When you change a price, decide what happens to offers already sent. The most defensible rule is the simplest: quotes in flight stay valid until their expiry date, the new price applies to offers issued afterwards. Telling recurring clients the effective date in advance avoids the awkward call once the invoice lands.

Common mistakes

Listing everything you know how to do. A sixty-line price list never gets updated and never gets used: whoever writes the quote cannot find the right row and types it by hand. List the repeatable work and treat the rest as a custom line.

Pricing on quoted hours instead of real ones. This is the error that erodes margin without appearing anywhere, because on paper the quote always balances. The antidote is comparing estimate against actuals on your main lines.

Discounting to speed up a signature. When an offer stalls, price is rarely the reason: more often nobody picked the thread back up. Before touching the price, try the method in the guide on how to follow up a quote, because a discount given in a hurry stays in the client's expectations afterwards.

How long it takes and what comes next

The first version takes half a focused day if you have invoices and costs to hand: two hours for the items and units, two for costs and prices, one for terms and discounts. Do not chase the definitive version, chase the usable one: missing items get added when somebody needs them.

The next step is connecting it to your offers, so that every quote pulls its lines from the list instead of rewriting them and discounts stay tracked row by row. From there you can finally answer the question you cannot ask today: which lines actually make you money.

Then there are the tax questions around published prices, starting with whether to show amounts net or inclusive of VAT: these are general notes on commercial organisation, so for your own situation check with your accountant.

Frequently asked questions

Should I publish my price list on my website? Two separate decisions: having an internal price list always pays, publishing it is a positioning choice. It works when services are standardised and the price filters inbound enquiries, much less when every job has to be scoped.

How often should a service price list be updated? A full review once a year plus a quarterly check covers almost every case. Off-cycle, you only act when a cost moves visibly, for example a supplier raising rates mid-year.

How do I handle custom prices for a long-standing client? If it is two or three lines, they stay as terms on the quote rows with the reason written down. If it becomes ten, it is no longer an exception: it is a dedicated price list, and it is worth formalising with a validity date.

Should prices be shown net or inclusive of VAT? It depends who reads them: business to business normally works on net amounts, while for consumers the price has to be communicated so it is clear what they will actually pay. Whichever you choose, state it on the document and check with your advisor what applies to your business.