The Practitioner Who Charged Less for Clients She Liked and What It Cost Her

This is a composite practitioner story based on common patterns in pricing development. Details are illustrative.

Kezia had a stated rate: $350 per session. She also had an unstated practice: she charged some clients less. Not all clients, not clients who asked, not clients with demonstrated financial need. She charged less for clients she connected with strongly — the ones who seemed like kindred spirits, whose work resonated with her own, whose situations she found particularly interesting.

She didn’t think of it as pricing by affinity. She thought of it as adjusting for fit, or for what she called “resonance pricing” — a made-up term for a real but imprecise practice of trusting her gut about what felt right to charge. A client who set off strong enthusiasm in her would end up at $280. A client she liked but didn’t feel deeply called to work with would be at the stated $350.

The pattern ran for about two years before she looked at it clearly.

What She Was Actually Doing

What nobody explains about affinity and pricing is that when affinity drives the rate, the rate stops being about the work and starts being about the practitioner’s emotional experience of the potential client. The work being delivered is the same. The outcome potential is the same. What changes is how stimulated or connected the practitioner feels — which is real information about fit, but not obviously information about price.

When Kezia reduced the rate for clients she felt strong resonance with, she was in effect providing a discount for being interesting to her. The client who sparked her curiosity paid less than the client who didn’t. This seems intuitively generous, but it has some strange implications.

The client who paid full rate — $350 — was paying for work Kezia was delivering with less personal investment. The client who paid $280 was receiving work Kezia was more engaged with, at a lower price. The economic exchange was calibrated backward from how it might appear if the logic were stated directly.

The self-worth dimension of inconsistent pricing also appeared in Kezia’s pattern, though less obviously. The discounts she gave to clients she liked were partly an expression of wanting those clients — of trying to make it easier for them to say yes, to make the investment more accessible for people she wanted to work with. This is not entirely incoherent, but it conflates two separate questions: whether a client is a good fit, and whether the rate should be adjusted to attract them.

What the Pattern Cost

The costs of this pattern were spread across several dimensions.

The most visible was income. Kezia had a practice where roughly a third of her clients were paying below her stated rate. Some months this was a $2,000-$3,000 difference from what she would have earned if all clients paid her stated rate. Over two years, the cumulative gap was significant.

The second cost was less visible: the quality of her engagement with full-rate clients. Kezia had constructed an unconscious hierarchy — clients she felt called to work with, and clients she was working with at the stated rate. The second group wasn’t receiving worse work, exactly, but they were receiving work from a practitioner who had already sorted them into a different category. That sorting wasn’t fair to them, and it wasn’t reflective of Kezia’s actual capacity to show up for the work regardless of personal resonance.

The third cost was to her pricing itself. A practitioner who regularly moves away from their stated rate — even for reasons that feel principled — erodes her own confidence in the rate. If $350 is the right rate, it should be the right rate across clients. When it bends for subjective reasons, the practitioner loses the stable ground of a rate they have genuinely decided on.

What consistent pricing produces is a different quality of relationship to the practice. It’s not rigidity — it’s the clarity of a practitioner who has done the work of determining what the work costs and is not recalculating per client.

What She Changed and How

The change Kezia made was not about eliminating responsiveness to clients’ situations. She continued to have a small number of reduced-fee slots for clients with genuine financial constraints, operated through a clear, stated policy. What she eliminated was the affinity-based discounting — the implicit rate reduction for clients who sparked her interest.

Moving toward a stable, consistent rate required her to separate two things she had been running together: whether a client was a good fit, and what the client would pay. Fit could still influence whether she took a client. It would no longer influence what she charged.

The first few months of this were uncomfortable. She felt the pull, several times, toward offering a reduction to a client she felt called to work with. She held the rate. What she found was that the clients she felt most drawn to — the ones with the specific problems she found most interesting, the most genuine curiosity about their own development — were capable of paying the full rate. The resonance she felt didn’t actually correlate with financial constraint. It correlated with the quality of the client’s engagement with the work.

When she removed the affinity discount, she found she was working with the same quality of clients she had always valued — just at a rate that reflected the work honestly. A reason why that holds across clients is one grounded in the work, not in who the practitioner most wants to work with.

What She Understood Afterward

Kezia understood, working through this, that “resonance pricing” had been a cover for something else — a belief that her enthusiasm for a client should subsidize their access to the work. It’s a generous impulse. It’s also one that doesn’t scale and that, over time, creates a practice organized around the practitioner’s emotional experience rather than around honest, sustainable economic structure.

Her clients who paid full rate were not, she found, less satisfying to work with. The satisfaction she got from sessions was more related to the client’s engagement and the quality of the work than to the initial spark of resonance she had used as her discount criterion.

Pricing is one of the places where the practitioner’s emotional patterns express themselves most directly. The Abundance GPS Skool community holds space for looking at those patterns honestly and building something more stable in their place. Join us here.