Tēnā koe, Pera here.
This isn’t really a customer support document or a pricing guide. Its a kōrero I’ve had enough times outside of Kaha Create to share here because I know putting a price on what you’re sharing - whether mātauranga or mahi toi - is uncomfortable.
I'm not going to tell you that a one-hour course should cost $49, or $249, or that if you multiply your hourly rate by 3.7 you'll magically discover what your mātauranga is worth.
Pricing your work isn’t hard because you don't think it has value. It’s usually because you know how much went into learning it.
Some of the knowledge I hold, I'd sit down and share with you over a coffee for nothing. Some of it I have shared hundreds of times without ever thinking about sending anyone an invoice afterwards.
When something comes from a place of aroha, or service to our people, or we think about it’s whakapapa, adding a dollar sign to it can feel weird.
If the customer isn't paying, your whānau is - Te Puoho Katene
If you spend a day recording a resource, that's a day you didn't spend somewhere else. If you give somebody two hours of your expertise for free, those hours came from somewhere. If you've spent twenty years learning the thing you can now explain in twenty minutes, those twenty years weren't free either.
There were probably mistakes in there.
People who taught you. Courses you paid for. Jobs you did. Relationships.
Late nights. Things that went very badly. Things you would definitely do differently now.
And if yours are anything like the lessons that people ask me most often to share, a fair amount of tears. I'm not saying you should put all of that into a spreadsheet and come up with a trauma fee.
The point is that the answer you can give easily today might only be easy because it was really hard to learn.
And an economy - even an economy built on aroha - needs reciprocity if we want it to keep going.
A one-sided exchange might be generous for a while.
Eventually it becomes depletion, exhaustion, and a price we wouldn’t knowingly ask our whānau or those who pay the price in the absence of customers to carry.
This matters especially when we're talking about mātauranga Māori.
Before:
What should I charge for this?
There may need to be:
Is this actually mine to sell?
Or:
Is this ours to share in this way?
Knowing something doesn't necessarily mean you are the only person with authority or a say in what happens to it.
Some mātauranga comes with whakapapa, relationships and responsibilities. There might be whānau, hapū, iwi or other kaitiaki whose interests need to be part of the conversation. There might be things that are fine to teach but not fine for somebody else to republish. Things that can be shared for educational purposes but not commercially. Things that should stay within a particular community. Things where benefits should flow back to more people than the person standing in front of the camera.
Wai 262 is about who controls Māori traditional knowledge and cultural works and says use of mātauranga Māori may need agreed terms covering access, protection and benefit sharing.
So before you even think about charging a fee, remember:
Price is not permission.
Someone paying to learn from you doesn't automatically answer what they're allowed to do with that knowledge afterwards.
But back to how to think about pricing your mātauranga. There are some questions we can work through. We’ve created a resource with some questions here to help: (link coming soon). Sometimes, after you work through those questions, the right price for a piece of mātauranga might be very high.
Sometimes it might be koha.
Sometimes it might be free.
And sometimes the answer might simply be:
This isn't for sale.
That's okay too.
One of the easiest traps with online courses is looking at the finished thing and thinking:
“It's only 45 minutes long. Surely I can't charge very much for that.”
Or
“It’s 45 minutes long. Surely I should charge a lot for that.”
The right question is: what did the 45 minutes do?
If I give you one sentence that stops you from making a $20,000 mistake, was the sentence only worth the nine seconds it took me to say it?
If somebody has spent twenty years becoming really good at something and can now teach the important part to you in an hour, why would their being a good teacher make the knowledge worth less?
The container or kete and the value are not the same thing.
A long course can be useless, and a short kōrero can change your life.
So rather than asking how many minutes of video somebody gets, ask:
What changes for them once they know this?
That's pretty close to what people call value-based pricing: looking at the outcome for the customer rather than only the seller's cost. Pricing research usually looks at things like:
time saved
costs avoided
revenue enabled
risk reduced
and what somebody would otherwise have to buy to reach the same outcome.
You don't need an MBA or a Chief of Pricing to use that idea.
Just ask some good questions.
Firstly:
Who is it for?
Does it build capability inside their organisation?
Does it lift the mana of their organisation or the people they serve?
Are they paying for it personally? Or is their employer paying from a professional-development budget?
What would they do without you?
Would they hire a consultant?
Would they spend three days at a workshop?
Would they spend six months slowly figuring it out?
Would they make expensive mistakes?
Would they need another staff member to do the work?
Or would they just not do it at all?
Those questions get you much closer to a useful price than “the video is 21 minutes long”.
This is an easy one to miss.
Imagine exactly the same resource.
One person is buying it personally because they're interested in the kaupapa and $150 is a meaningful amount of money out of their own pocket.
Another person works for a large organisation with a professional-development budget. They are going to apply the learning every week as part of their job.
A third organisation wants 40 staff to learn the same thing.
Those are not really the same economic situation.
The knowledge hasn't changed.
But the value, reach, buyer and alternative cost have.
You’ve probably heard the kōrero about the value of a bottle of water being different wherever it is - a bottle of water filled from my tap isn’t something I could/would sell to anyone. The same bottle might cost $3 dollars at the supermarket, $6 at the petrol station, $10 dollars at a concert, or become priceless in a desert.
Value-pricing reminds us that different customer groups can see different levels and kinds of value, which is one reason businesses often create different offers for individuals, teams and larger organisations (as well as giving different features per audience, like you can see on our pricing page here)
So you might have an individual price.
You might have an organisational price.
You might have a facilitated version where you come in afterwards for a hui.
You might make it free to one group using 100% discount coupons.
You might use koha or set-your-own price.
You don't have to make one little number carry every possible relationship you have with that knowledge and the value it creates in the world.
Now we get to some maths. Sorry.
There is one number I do think everybody should understand: the price below which the thing isn't actually sustainable for you. It's easy to not notice when you’re subsidising something. On a personal note, it took a long time for me to acknowledge that my whānau were paying the price for me giving away too much of my time for free. I work on a kaupapa called Shoebox Christmas and have given about a quarter of my year to it for the last 11 years - when I acknowledge that, I feel much more comfortable charging for my time, knowledge and the value I create outside it.
Think about your own time.
If you already contract, you've probably got some sense of what an hour of your professional time costs.
If you've only ever been on a salary, this can be harder. We've been trained to think of an employer as the person who decides what an hour of our time is worth.
Try turning that around:
What annual income would make doing this mahi sustainable?
What does it cost you to operate?
How much money do you need left over to keep developing the work?
And how many hours can you realistically spend on paid productive work once everything else involved in running the mahi is accounted for?
That gives you an internal rate.
Then work out roughly what went into creating the resource eg:
Research.
Planning.
Recording.
Editing.
Design.
Your own labour.
Any people you paid.
Any ongoing learner support.
Updating it six months later when something changes.
Then ask how many learners you realistically expect to go through this learning.
Not: “This is the internet, so potentially eight billion.”
Be realistic. Ten? Thirty? A hundred?
That gives you a rough sustainability floor.
Importantly: your floor is not your value.
Your floor is the price where, if you’re charging below that, you’re paying to give value through whatever it is you're sharing.
It doesn't tell you what the thing is worth to the person on the other side.
Those can be very different numbers.
Mainstream pricing frameworks say: your costs can help establish the bottom of your pricing range while the customer's value helps establish the top.
Somewhere between those two is your space to make a decision.
If all of that has made you more confused than when we started, here's my much less scientific pricing framework and an easy place to start.
Think about the coffee kōrero.
You've probably had one. Somebody asks you a question. You sit down and talk it through.
Twenty minutes later you've told them something it took you years to understand.
Maybe you've saved them weeks.
Maybe you've saved them thousands of dollars.
Maybe you've saved them a whole lot of heartache.
And they shout the coffees.
I've found this useful because it breaks one particular mental habit:
My knowledge and time should cost nothing.
Again, think about this in the context of whatever else you’re doing - obviously I’m not saying every time anyone asks for help you should charge, but coffee kōrero are an exchange in the aroha economy and are a good reminder that people are already happy to koha to you in exchange for the value you give.
Two coffee kōrero isn't a pricing strategy; it's just a place to start if your current thinking is that you could/should never charge to share your knowledge and your anchor point is zero.
Because zero is also a price.
It’s just not the person asking for the value who ends up paying it.
For me, koha doesn't mean:
“Free, unless you happen to feel guilty enough to give me money.”
Koha is an exchange. There is reciprocity in it.
And I think we can be much more intentional about that when we put a resource online.
On Kaha Create, we have pay-what-you-want pricing as an option you can choose - it isn't exactly the same thing as koha, but it’s getting there.
When using this as an option, customers will give, sometimes even more than if there was a fixed price, but obviously it depends on what’s being shared and who’s buying it. Obviously there’s a risk that people contribute less than it costs you to provide it - and there’s a whole wānanga to be had about the aroha economy: starter here: (Video)
If you're offering something on a koha basis, think about what people need to know in order to reciprocate well.
What would actually sustain the mahi?
Can you give them a suggested contribution?
Do you need a minimum?
Would a range help?
Could somebody who has more capacity contribute more and effectively help make access possible for somebody else?
And can you explain what their contribution enables?
That's very different from putting a blank box on the checkout screen and hoping people somehow figure out what it’s worth and how they can carry out this exchange in the aroha economy.
After all of this, I don't want the conclusion to be that you should monetise every piece of knowledge you have.
Some things I share because I want them in the world.
Other stuff I share because somebody helped me once and this is part of how I pass that on.
Sometimes I share with my people because that relationship makes it the right thing to do.
Some resources might be deliberately free because reach is the point.
That's up to you.
The difference is whether that giving is being chosen or simply expected from you.
There is a huge difference between:
“I've decided to give this.”
and:
“Everybody assumes I'll keep giving this forever and I don't feel like I can charge.”
Financial sustainability can actually give you more room to be even more generous.
If the paid work sustains you, you can say yes to the kaupapa where money shouldn't be the barrier.
If every piece of work is underpriced, eventually you lose that freedom.
I’m a kaiwhakairo (carver), and this is something I think about a lot with the works that I sell.
Someone might buy a taonga for $300 or $600 and - understandably - think hard about whether or not to pay that price. That taonga, particularly if it’s a pounamu piece, might be in their whānau for multiple generations. Their great-grandchild might be wearing it long after the original person I gave it to has gone. Decades later, nobody in their whānau will remember what it cost. They’ll only remember the value of it now.
At some point, the original difference in price becomes almost meaningless compared with the years of value that followed.
Your knowledge and learned wisdom is a taonga.
We tend to overweight the moment somebody hands over the money and underweight everything that happens afterwards.
Some more questions to think about:
How long will they use this?
How often will it affect a decision they make?
How many other people might benefit from what they learn?
Are you giving them information they'll forget next week?
Or capability they'll carry for the next ten years?
Sometimes that is a more useful way to think about value than counting modules.
And finally: you don't have to get this right on your first attempt.
There are whole branches of pricing research on asking customers where prices begin to feel cheap, reasonable, expensive and completely unaffordable. One approach,
Van Westendorp's Price Sensitivity Meter, is basically built around those four boundaries.
You can do a simple version yourself:
Ask some people who are genuinely in your audience:
At what price would this feel suspiciously cheap?
At what price would it feel like really good value?
At what price would you pause and think hard about it?
At what price would you walk away?
Listen to the answers.
Then put a price on it and see what people actually do.
People are much better at spending imaginary money in surveys than real money from their card or pocket. So treat what they tell you as evidence, not proof, and keep looking at actual behaviour after you launch.
Maybe you start at $80 and discover everybody tells you it should have been $200.
Cool.
Change it.
Maybe you start at $300, and nobody buys it.
That doesn't necessarily mean the knowledge isn't worth $300. Maybe you're talking to the wrong audience, or you haven't explained the value, or maybe the offer is wrong… or maybe $300 really is too much.
You can always change it based on what you learn.
After all those words, I still can’t give you the number.
But I would work through these questions, or use the pricing tool on Kaha Create.
You don't need to charge somebody for every hard thing that ever taught you something.
And you don't need to turn every generous act into a transaction.
But you also don’t need to pretend that what you know arrived for free or that you sharing it for free forever doesn’t cost you and your whānau.
Whether as a kaupapa, organisation, or individual, being properly resourced gives you choices.
It gives you the freedom to keep doing good work and the freedom to make some things free.
How you price what you've built is yours to decide.
Just know that you're allowed to value it.
Ngā manaakitanga,
Pera
