Meeting Cost Calculator
The recurring cousin: the meetings you sit in by default, their length and the prep around them, priced at your rate — per week, per month, and across the working year.
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The Get Paid Kit · Planning
Free client onboarding cost calculator
The work starts before the work starts. Between a client’s yes and the first hour you can bill there are calls to run, a proposal and paperwork to produce, logins and files to set up, and a first week of small questions — work that appears on no invoice, and is easy to call free because nobody has priced it. On the defaults below it is seven hours: $665 of your time at a $95 rate, given away at the exact moment the relationship is newest. Do that twelve times a year and the habit costs $7,980 — before a single project has earned anything. This page prices the start, stage by stage. It is not the onboarding checklist, which lists the steps so none of them are missed; this is its price tag. And it is not the meeting cost calculator, which prices the calls that recur — these are the hours that happen once per client, at the door.
Runs in your browser — nothing you enter is uploaded, sent to a server or stored anywhere except this device. The figures exist only in this page. This is a planning estimate for your own numbers, not financial advice.
What starting with a client takes
Count a real start, not a tidy one. Take the last client you took on and walk the calendar and the sent folder: the calls you remember are the floor — the paperwork and the chasing are what this page exists to catch.
What the start costs
— the cost of starting with one client
Enter your rate and the hours your starts take, and the price appears here.
—Hours of starting work inside every new client.
—Across a year of starts, at the count you entered.
—Hours a year spent starting, not delivering.
—Carried silently per month of an average engagement.
| Discovery & admin calls | — |
| Proposal & paperwork | — |
| Setup, access & accounts | — |
| Kickoff & first-week questions | — |
| Total starting hours per client | — |
| Cost per client | — |
| New clients per year | — |
| Starting hours per year | — |
| Cost per year | — |
| Carried per client, per month of the engagement | — |
| The deposit test — half the first invoice | — |
| Times the deposit covers the cost of starting | — |
Enter your rate and your stages, and this line reads the shape of the answer back to you — including whether your deposit covers the start, or you do.
Worked example
A freelancer at a $95 rate whose start with a new client takes an hour and a half of calls, two hours of proposal and paperwork, an hour of setup and access, and two and a half hours across the kickoff and the first week’s questions — and who starts with twelve clients a year, each staying about eight months, on a typical first invoice of $1,900. Enter those numbers above and the calculator returns exactly this:
| Discovery & admin calls | 1.5 hours |
| Proposal & paperwork | 2 hours |
| Setup, access & accounts | 1 hour |
| Kickoff & first-week questions | 2.5 hours |
| Total starting hours per client | 7 hours |
| Cost per client | $665.00 |
| New clients per year | 12 |
| Starting hours per year | 84 hours |
| Cost per year | $7,980.00 |
| Carried per client, per month (8-month engagement) | $83.13 a month across 8 months |
| The deposit test — half the first invoice | $950.00 — 50% of $1,900.00 |
| Times the deposit covers the cost of starting | 1.4× |
Read the shape, not just the total. The calls are the stage everyone remembers; the paperwork and the setup are the same size again, and they appear on no invoice. And the fix is arithmetic, not attitude: cut the stages to four hours — a checklist for the calls, templates for the paperwork, one folder pattern for the setup — and this page returns $380.00 a client. That is $285.00 saved on every start, $3,420.00 across twelve, bought with documents you write once. The deposit line matters as much: at $950.00 it covers the $665.00 start 1.4 times over — which is why the deposit is neither greed nor ceremony. It is the start, invoiced at the one moment the client can still say no.
The method
How the number works
- Count the start in stages, not as a blur. “Onboarding takes ages” cannot be fixed or priced; four stages with hours on them can. The calls, the paperwork, the setup and the kickoff week are different kinds of work with different fixes, and a stage that genuinely never happens in your practice gets an honest zero — the zero is data, not a gap. The onboarding checklist names the steps themselves; this page exists because a step you can list is not yet a step you have priced. One boundary matters: a discovery stage that is itself billed — a paid discovery phase the client agreed to — is delivery, not onboarding, and does not belong in this count.
- Unbilled hours are still priced at your rate. The seven hours are not worth less because no client was charged for them. They come out of the same sellable year as the billed work — every hour spent starting is an hour not spent delivering at the rate, which is why the rate is the honest price for them. The meeting cost calculator makes the same argument about the calendar; if you do not yet have a rate you trust, the hourly rate calculator builds it from your income, costs and hours first.
- Short engagements carry the start badly. Spread across an eight-month engagement, the $665 start is $83.13 a month — easy to absorb, easy to ignore. The same start under a client who leaves after two months is $332.50 a month, four times the silent overhead, carried by a relationship that barely began. This is the arithmetic underneath the feeling that churn is exhausting: it is not only the work that repeats, it is the door. A practice of short engagements has to price the start into the rate, the deposit, or a stated setup fee — because it pays the start far more often per dollar earned than a practice of long ones.
- The deposit is the start, invoiced early. Read the deposit test in the results: half the first invoice, set against the cost of starting. On the defaults it covers the start 1.4 times over, which reframes what a deposit is for — before it is protection against non-payment, it is the one part of the job’s cost that is certain, collected at the one moment it can be. When the coverage falls below 1.0×, the calculator says so in red: you are financing your own admin out of pocket on every client. The deposit & milestone schedule calculator sizes the split itself, stage by stage, against the dates the money should land.
- Shrink the hours; do not absorb them. The fix is not to start faster and sloppier — a rushed start bills you later in confusion and rework. The fix is to make each stage shorter by writing it down once: the onboarding checklist run the same way every time, the proposal and agreement written from templates instead of a blank page, the access request sent as one list instead of five emails. Documenting your processes is where a solo turns those into standing documents. On the defaults, taking the stages from seven hours to four returns $285.00 a client — $3,420.00 a year at twelve starts — and the documents that buy it are written exactly once.
Read it beside its siblings. The project profitability calculator is where these hours surface a second time: inside a finished project’s real rate, the calls, paperwork and setup counted as part of what the fee actually bought — usually the largest unbilled block in the job. The client lifetime value calculator prices the other end of the same relationship, what a client is worth across the years they stay; this page prices the door they walk through to get there.
Disclaimer: This is a planning estimate for your own numbers, not financial advice. The verdict bands — a start of up to 4 hours reads lean, 4 to 8 hours typical, past 8 hours heavy — are this page’s working frame for a solo practice, not a standard. The deposit test reads the standard 50% share against the start; if your terms set a different share, the coverage scales with it.
Planning
More planning tools
Project Profitability Calculator
Where the starting hours surface again: a finished project’s fee divided by every hour it really took — onboarding included — against the rate you quoted.
Open tool →Deposit & Milestone Schedule Calculator
The cover for the cost above: turn a project price into the payment schedule itself — 50/50, thirds or milestones — with every stage’s amount, due date and unpaid exposure shown.
Open tool →Questions
Client onboarding cost questions
Usually not as its own line — the cost is real, but it has two honest homes. The first is the deposit: on this page’s defaults, a 50% deposit on the first invoice covers the $665 cost of starting 1.4 times over, which is the deposit doing one of the jobs it exists for. The second is the rate itself: spread across an average engagement, the start is $83.13 a month on the defaults — small enough to carry inside the rate once you know it is there. A stated setup fee is legitimate in some trades, and clients accept it when it is named before they sign. What never works is the surprise: a charge for starting that appears after the yes, for work the client believed was already agreed.
No — it means your stages are already short, and the calculator will happily price them at twenty minutes: enter your real hours and it returns your real cost. The defaults describe a solo whose start is still handmade — calls arranged one by one, paperwork written per client, access chased by email. If yours is templated, run the handmade version once, from memory, and the gap between the two numbers is what your checklist earns you a year. And if a stage genuinely never happens in your work, set it to zero. The honest zero is the whole point of counting in stages.
On no invoice — which is exactly why it has to be counted here. It shows up inside the rate a finished project really paid: the fee divided by every hour the work took, including the seven before the first billable one. The project profitability calculator counts a job that way, and onboarding is usually the largest unbilled block in it. It also shows up in churn: on the defaults above, a client who leaves after two months has carried $332.50 a month of starting cost, against $83.13 from one who stays eight. Short relationships are not only disappointing; at the start, they are the most expensive hours you sell.