Margin Calculator
The reading every tier on this page stands on: one price, its true costs — your hours at your rate included — and out comes the margin, the markup, and the price a target margin needs.
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The Get Paid Kit · Pricing
Free pricing tier builder
Three prices for one package only work when the three prices buy three different things. This builder starts from your real offer — the middle tier, priced from the costs to deliver it, the way the margin calculator reads them — and steps it down and up: a smaller scope below it, a fuller scope above it, each tier with its own price, its own delivery cost and its own margin, all read honestly before a client ever sees the ladder. On the defaults — a package priced at $1,900 that costs $1,140 to deliver — the ladder reads $1,140 at a 30.0% margin, $1,900 at 40.0% and $3,040 at 53.1%. The outer tiers are not decoration. They exist to make the middle tier’s value legible, which is the doctrine our guide to productizing a freelance service sets out — and a tier you would not happily deliver is not an anchor. It is a decoy, and decoys are how honest pricing turns into theatre.
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.
One package, three honest tiers
Costs do not scale with prices on their own. A tier at 60% of the price does not cost 60% as much to deliver unless its scope says so — which is why every tier carries its own cost share, entered by you, instead of a margin this page invented.
The ladder, with its margins showing
| Tier | Price | Cost to deliver | Profit kept | Margin |
| — | — | — | — | — |
| — ★ the one most clients should pick | — | — | — | — |
| — | — | — | — | — |
Enter the middle tier and the ladder appears here.
The middle tier is the offer. The other two make its value legible — at scopes you would happily deliver.
Worked example
The numbers pre-filled above are a complete worked example: a package priced at $1,900, costing $1,140 to deliver, stepped down to 60% of the price at 70% of the cost and up to 160% of the price at 125% of the cost. Enter those numbers and the builder returns exactly this:
| Tier | Price | Cost to deliver | Profit kept | Margin |
| Essential | $1,140.00 | $798.00 | $342.00 | 30.0% |
| Standard | $1,900.00 | $1,140.00 | $760.00 | 40.0% |
| Premium | $3,040.00 | $1,425.00 | $1,615.00 | 53.1% |
Read the scopes, not just the prices. Essential is not Standard at 40% off: it removes the revisions round and the rush, and its cost falls to $798.00 because there is genuinely less work in it. Premium is not Standard with a markup: it adds priority scheduling and a strategy session, and its cost rises to $1,425.00 because those things take real time. The margins — 30.0%, 40.0%, 53.1% — are what is left when each price meets its own honest cost.
Now the ladder not to build. Steps of 90% and 110% on the same base would read $1,710.00, $1,900.00 and $2,090.00 — three prices so close that the client compares the numbers instead of the scopes, and picks the cheapest almost every time, because nothing tells them what the extra $190 buys. A spread ladder gives each step room to carry a visibly different scope. The spread is not greed; it is the space the scope differences need in order to be seen.
The method
How honest tiers work
- Scope steps, not price steps. The first rule, and the one this builder is built around: a tier ladder where only the price changes is a trick, and clients feel it even when they cannot name it. Each tier must add or remove something real — a deliverable, a revisions round, a turnaround, a layer of support — and the scope line is written before the price is published. Our guide to productizing a freelance service draws the package’s edges in full, and its fifth step builds the tiers from those edges, never from generosity. A decoy tier — priced to be refused, stuffed to look big — is a promise you are hoping nobody accepts. That is not anchoring. It is dishonesty with good graphic design.
- Price the spread, honestly. The defaults step to 60% and 160% of the middle, and the width is deliberate. Steps too tight — 90% and 110% — collapse into one price wearing three hats: the gaps are smaller than the scope differences they are meant to signal, so the ladder stops communicating and starts haggling with itself. Steps too wide do the opposite damage: the lower tier reads as a different, lesser product, and the upper as fantasy. Between those failures sits a ladder where each step is large enough to buy something visible. Start at 60/160, then move the steps when your own delivery record — not a pricing blog — says the scopes sit closer together or further apart than that.
- Check every tier’s margin, not just the middle’s. The middle tier’s margin is the one everyone checks; the outer tiers are where ladders quietly leak. The lower tier is the classic leak: priced at 60% out of politeness while its scope still carries 90% of the work, it sells the most and keeps the least. This builder scales each tier’s cost by the share of the base cost its scope really carries — an estimate, entered by you, and labelled as one. Replace the estimate with evidence as you deliver: the project profitability calculator runs the full autopsy on a finished tier, and the margin calculator re-reads the line once its real hours are known.
- Where the ladder lives. On the proposal’s price page, where our proposal template guide sets the doctrine: one recommendation, clearly marked — which is why the middle tier carries the star in the block above. The same three prices, word for word, belong on your rate card; a ladder that differs between the proposal and the card teaches clients that your prices are negotiable fiction. And the ladder is reviewed like everything else you sell: when a tier’s scope drifts — the extra every client asks for folded in, the add-on nobody buys — the quarterly sitting that reviews your packages re-steps it, or retires it.
Disclaimer: This is a planning estimate for your own numbers, not financial advice. The scope factors are your estimates of what each tier costs to deliver; the calculator does honest arithmetic on the figures you give it. What you charge is your decision.
Questions
Pricing tier questions
Three. Two tiers is an ultimatum — the client is really being asked one yes-or-no question with a decoy attached, and they can feel it. Four is a menu: the client stops comparing value and starts comparing line items, and the bespoke conversation the package existed to end starts all over again. Three gives a genuine lower rung for a smaller budget, the real offer in the middle, and a fuller version for the client who wants more — each a different scope, never the same scope at three prices.
Only if you would happily deliver it — at that scope, at that price — to a client you like. The cheap tier is not a prop in a pricing trick; it is a real offer that real clients will choose, often your favourite kind: small budgets, clear needs, no drama. If a tier exists only to make the middle look reasonable and you would quietly resent delivering it, it fails the one rule this page is built on: every tier on the ladder is a promise you are willing to keep. Cut the tier, not the honesty.
No. An hour is an hour: a premium hour that costs more but contains the same sixty minutes is a price trick with the scope difference left blank, and clients can feel that too. Tiers belong to packaged outcomes, where scope genuinely steps — more deliverables, more speed, more support. Time-shaped work prices differently: the day rate calculator handles the day shape, and our guide to value pricing covers the work whose price should leave the hour behind altogether.
Planning
More planning tools
Project Price Calculator
One quote, built from the bottom up: honest hours per part, a risk buffer and expenses, the payment fee read both ways, and the deposit the quote implies.
Open tool →Project Profitability Calculator
The fee is not the profit. Price your own hours at your real rate, add subcontractor and project costs, and see what a project actually makes — the profit, the margin, and the hourly rate it really pays you.
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