How Do I Price My Services When I Live in a Low-Cost Area?

Living in a lower-cost area creates a specific pricing confusion: the local economic context feels like the relevant benchmark, but the actual clients — especially for online work — often come from a very different economic context.

A practitioner in a rural region, a smaller city, or a country with lower average incomes may be charging $75 per session because that’s what feels reasonable relative to local norms — while serving clients in major metropolitan areas who wouldn’t blink at $250.

The Location Trap

Location anchoring is a pricing error that doesn’t feel like an error. It feels like realism — like knowing what the market will bear. The problem is that “the market” for online coaching and consulting work is usually not the local market. It’s the practitioner’s actual client base, wherever those clients are located.

What geography-based pricing signals depends on which market it’s being applied to. In the local market, it may be appropriate. In the practitioner’s actual client market — which may be entirely online, in higher-cost regions, or international — it likely signals that the work is positioned below its actual level.

A software developer in a lower-cost country who does identical work to one in a higher-cost city doesn’t have to charge based on local wages — they charge based on the value of the work in the market where the work is sold. The same applies to coaching and consulting.

Where the Real Market Is

How the right market defines value starts with a clear answer to the question: who are my actual clients, and what is the economic context of their lives? For an online practitioner, this answer may have nothing to do with the practitioner’s local cost of living.

If the actual clients are professionals in the US, UK, Australia, or Western Europe — or are professionals anywhere with disposable income to invest in coaching or healing — the relevant pricing benchmark is what practitioners who serve that population charge, not what local coaches in the practitioner’s town charge.

What nobody explains about pricing is that the practitioner’s cost of living is not the right variable for setting a client-facing rate. The cost of living might inform the practitioner’s minimum income floor — the number they need to sustain their own life. But the rate itself is determined by the value the work produces for the client and the market in which the client is making the decision.

Positioning for the Right Market

Positioning for the right market requires that the practitioner actively orient their positioning — their website, their content, their language, their examples — toward the clients they’re actually serving, not the local context. A practitioner in a smaller market who speaks to and for the population they serve, using language and references that resonate with that population, is building associations appropriate to that market.

The location is where the practitioner lives. The market is where the clients are. For online work, these can be entirely separate things — and pricing should follow the second, not the first.

A Reason Why That Transcends Location

A reason why that transcends location is grounded in the work itself: what the engagement produces, what the practitioner brings, what shifts for the client. None of those are functions of where the practitioner happens to live.

The practitioner in a lower-cost area who prices based on local norms and serves a global market is effectively subsidizing their clients based on a geographic accident. The price that reflects the work — wherever the work is delivered from — is the accurate one.

Pricing for the right market, regardless of location, is part of what the Abundance GPS Skool community holds space for. Join us here.