Pricing is one of the hardest things for service businesses. Especially "knowledge" businesses - where you do something that takes you time and expertise but doesn't really cost in terms of materials.
How do you price those things up?
There are a number of different pricing models out there, but the one that most of us end up using is called "Cost-Plus".
You see it all the time on those "freelance rate calculators". You put in how much you need to bring in to pay the bills and so on. You figure out how many hours per year you can work, then take a few off because of holidays, illness and because you need to spend some time finding clients.
Now you've got an amount you need to bring in and you've got a number of hours per year - divide one by the other and you've got an hourly rate.
This is your cost - the amount of money that your business needs to spend just to keep you going.
Then you add some percentage to that hourly rate - a 20% or whatever surcharge - to cover the other bits and pieces that you need.
You take your costs and you add a bit to it.
Personally, I really don't like cost-plus pricing. It comes from manufacturing, where you would buy materials, then charge for labour and add a markup on top.
But services aren't like that. Our limiting factor isn't the amount of wood or metal we can get our hands on. It's how much time we have available. And time is the most valuable thing we have.
Cost-plus works for manufacturing because materials are a commodity. You can switch suppliers, you can get more; if the price goes up, you charge more.
But it doesn't work for services because time isn't a commodity. You only have 24 hours in a day. You only have 52 weeks in a year. You can't switch suppliers and get more of it.
So treat your time as the valuable resource that it is and avoid cost-plus pricing.