April 30, 2026
How to Set the Initial Price for a New Productized Service
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On today’s Ditcherville LIVE session, I was asked:
How do I set the price of a brand-spanking-new productized service?
Let’s start with a definition:
Productized Service—A fixed-scope high-touch service that you offer at a published price. It’s fundamentally a service, but with product-like benefits that allow you to optimize the packaging, pricing, marketing, sales, delivery, and follow-up. Examples: Website teardown, mobile usability report, onboarding analysis, security audit, application architecture, etc.
Given that a productized service is a fixed scope, you can price it based on your costs.
And yes, I realize that this is the exact opposite of what I recommend when value pricing custom projects.
Here’s why:
Unlike custom projects, you can’t base the price of a productized service on the value of the outcome to the client because you typically don’t talk to the client before they make the purchase.
Okay, so what do you do?
Here’s the most basic approach:
- Determine the least amount you’d be willing to accept for this service.
- Consider doubling that number to give yourself a margin for surprises.
- Find clients for whom the published price is acceptable.
On the call, I described a slightly more effective approach, but it requires a little more effort. From the call transcript:
There’s a little bit more sophisticated approach where you do it pro bono for the three clients in exchange for feedback on the delivery, perhaps a testimonial if they’re really happy with the outcome, and then pricing guidance.
Which basically looks like this: after you’re all done, you finish the thing with them, and you do sort of a postmortem — like, what did you think? Hopefully, they say really glowing things, and you say, “This is amazing. Would it be okay if I sent you over some questions and turn that into a testimonial?” They’ll say yes because they’re so happy.
Then you say, “Okay, so I wanted to get a sense of pricing from you. If this was $5,000, would you recommend it to someone else like you?” Ideally, you would do this in person or in a Zoom call so you could watch their eyebrows. If their eyebrows go up, like shocked, that means they wouldn’t have paid that, and they probably wouldn’t recommend it to other people at that price. If their eyebrows go down, like, “Oh yeah, that’s a for sure, I would definitely do that,” then you know you’re in the ballpark, or maybe the price that you suggested is too low. Or if they’re like, “Yeah, that’s about right,” then obviously you’re in the ballpark.
It’s important that you bounce a number off them, because they will almost react to it reflexively — they can’t stop themselves from reacting to it, usually. If you said something like, “Well, how much would you have paid for that?” then they’re like, “I don’t know, I mean, maybe...” They have a really hard time coming up with an answer to a question like that. But they almost can’t help but visibly react to you bouncing a price off them.
So pick a price that you are planning to sell it for as a starting price — probably the lowest you’ll ever sell it — and bounce that number off them and gauge their reaction, and adjust up or down based on the reaction.
Hope that helps!
BTW - This is the kind of question that comes up every two weeks in Ditcherville LIVE, my group Q&A session for independent consultants who are done trading time for money.
If you’ve got questions like this rattling around in your head, come get them answered:
Hope to see you inside!
Yours,
—J