Somebody asks what you charge for a full set, or a facial, or a course of six, and you hear yourself giving a number you picked eighteen months ago because it sounded about right compared to a salon you have never been inside.
Quick answer: price from your own costs, not from what the salon down the road charges. Add product cost, the full appointment time including setup and turnaround, and your share of monthly overhead, then set the price above that number.
The number you copied is not your number
Almost everyone starts pricing the same way. You look at three or four artists nearby, take a rough average, shave a little off because you are newer, and that becomes your price list. It is understandable and it is nearly always wrong, because the businesses you copied do not have your costs.
A salon buys product at trade volume. It splits rent across six chairs. It pays a therapist an hourly wage and keeps the rest. You buy in ones and twos, carry your overheads alone, and the wage and the profit and the business are all the same person. Copying their price and none of their economics is how skilled artists end up busy and broke at the same time.
A full diary at the wrong price is not a good year. It is a lot of work for someone else's margin.
The three costs inside every service
Every treatment on your menu contains the same three costs. Get these on paper once and pricing stops being a feeling.
1. Product cost
What you actually consume in that one appointment. Not the price of the bottle, the price of the portion. A gel polish that costs $18 and covers roughly twenty sets is about $0.90 per set. Add the file, the buffer, the wipes, the couch roll, the gloves, the mask, the towel that needs washing. Individually they feel too small to count. Across a month they are not.
2. Time, all of it
This is where most solo artists lose money without noticing. You price a sixty minute facial as sixty minutes. The actual appointment is closer to eighty five once you count setting up, greeting, consultation, the treatment, aftercare, checkout, rebooking, stripping the couch, sanitising, and resetting for the next person.
If you price the treatment and give away the turnaround, you are working a full day and billing for two thirds of it.
3. Overhead, per service
Rent or room rental, insurance, software, phone, laundry, professional body membership, training, card processing fees, replacing tools. Add your monthly total, divide by the number of services you realistically deliver in a month, and you have the amount every single appointment has to carry before you have earned anything.
A worked example
These numbers are an illustration, not a benchmark. Run the same rows with your own figures and the shape of the answer will be very different from the number you were guessing at.
| Line | Example figure | How it was worked out |
|---|---|---|
| Product used in this service | $9 | Portions of gel, prep, files, wipes, disposables |
| Real appointment time | 105 minutes | 90 minute treatment plus 15 minutes setup and turnaround |
| Hourly rate you need to earn | $45 | Chosen by the artist, before overheads |
| Time cost | $78.75 | 105 minutes at $45 per hour |
| Monthly overhead | $900 | Room, insurance, software, phone, laundry, fees |
| Services delivered per month | 60 | Realistic, not best case |
| Overhead per service | $15 | $900 divided by 60 |
| Cost floor for this service | $102.75 | $9 plus $78.75 plus $15 |
The floor is not the price. It is the number below which the appointment costs you money to perform.
Two things usually happen when an artist runs this for the first time. The first is mild shock at how much of the price is time rather than product. The second is the realisation that at least one service on the menu has been running at or below the floor for a year, usually the one that takes longest and feels the most generous to offer.
Built for solo beauty artists
See what you actually earned this month
Artisée records every payment against the client and the booking, so your revenue, average service value and outstanding balances sit in one place instead of a notebook.
See plans and pricing Every new studio gets a full month of Pro on us.Fills, courses and add ons
Three places where the arithmetic quietly goes wrong.
Fills. Price them from their real duration, not as a neat fraction of a full set. If your fills have crept up to eighty minutes because you are repairing and rebalancing every time, they are no longer a discounted service, and the price should follow the time.
Courses and packages. A course of six at a discount is a decision to earn less per session in exchange for money up front and a client who commits. That can be a good trade. It stops being one if you never track how many sessions have been used, which is how a course of six becomes a course of seven.
Add ons. Repairs, extra length, nail art, an extra mask, an upgraded serum. These are the items most likely to be done for free out of politeness. Put them on the menu with a price. You can still choose to waive one, but that is a decision you make, not a habit you fall into.
A useful test: if you cannot name the price of something without checking, you are probably not charging for it consistently.
Raising your prices
The rise itself is rarely the problem. The way it lands is.
Pick a date, four to six weeks out
Far enough away that regulars feel warned, close enough that you do not spend two months dreading it.
Tell people directly
A short message to your client list, not a story buried in a post. "From 1 October my prices are changing. A full set will be $X and a fill will be $Y. Anything already booked before then stays at the current price. Thank you for being with me, it means a lot."
Do not over explain
You do not owe anyone a breakdown of your supplier costs. One line about product and running costs going up is plenty. Long justifications read as an invitation to negotiate.
Honour existing bookings
Anyone already in the diary past the change date pays the old price. It costs you very little and it removes the only genuinely reasonable objection anyone can make.
Hold the new price
The first client who pushes back is the whole test. If you quietly keep her at the old rate, word travels and the rise never really happened.
Review it once a year
Put a date in your calendar twelve months from now to run the same three numbers again. Product costs move, your speed improves, your overheads change, and a price list that never changes is a slow pay cut.
The artists who feel calm about money are almost never the ones charging the most. They are the ones who know exactly where the floor is, and never work below it by accident.