How to price your services

A competitor's price list tells you what clients in your area are used to paying. It does not tell you what your time costs. Work that out first: add up what one month of work costs you - rent or travel, materials, tools, your phone, the app you book with - then add what you want to take home, and divide by the hours you actually spend with clients. That is your hour. Every price you set is some part of it.

A 60-minute manicure rarely costs you 60 minutes. You also set up, sanitise and tidy before the next client walks in. In Beauty Booking each service has two lengths: the duration the client sees, and a cleanup time only you see. The calendar books both, so the time you spend tidying is protected. Price the whole block, not only the part the client is in the chair.

• Duration: what the client books and sees.
• Cleanup: your buffer between clients, booked on your calendar and never shown to the client.
• Price: what the client pays for the service, in your workplace currency.

Gel, pigments, lash extensions and single-use tools are real money on every visit. Put a number on what each service uses and make sure the price carries it with room to spare. When a supplier raises a price, that is a reason to review yours, not to absorb the difference quietly.

Clients choose faster from a short, clear list. Name each service the way a client would say it, and keep one price per service. Where a longer or more complex version exists, make it its own service with its own price and duration, rather than a vague "from" that is settled in the chair. A free consultation is fine too: leave the price at zero and it reads as Free.

Prices that never move quietly shrink every year. Review them on a fixed rhythm, for example twice a year, and when you change one, say so in plain words a few weeks ahead. Your history stays exact: past visits keep the price they were booked at, and for visits already booked at the old price, the app asks you whether to keep that price or move them to the new one. Your regulars never get a surprise at the end of a visit.

A price list that lives only in your head gets asked about in every chat. Keep it in the app and share it: Beauty Booking turns a category of your prices into a ready image for your stories or your page, drawn from the prices you already keep, so a post never shows an old number.

A single quiet day says little. Look at the month: what you earned, how many hours you worked, and what each hour really brought in. If the number is below the hour you worked out at the start, your prices are telling you something.