How to price your first online course as a therapist or coach

Pricing your first online course is one of the decisions practitioners agonise over most, and it is usually where they get stuck longest. Too low and you undervalue your expertise. Too high, and fear kicks in before you have even started. The honest answer is that there is no single right number, but there is a clear framework for finding yours, and it has far less to do with what other people are charging than most practitioners think.

Start with what the course actually delivers

Before you think about a number, get clear on the outcome. What does someone walk away with after completing your course? Not the content list - the transformation. What is different for them? What can they do, feel, understand, or navigate that they couldn't before?

The clearer you are on the outcome, the easier pricing becomes. Because you are not pricing a collection of videos and worksheets. You are pricing a result.

A course that helps a practitioner understand burnout and build a sustainable self-care practice is worth more than a list of self-care tips. A course that walks a client through processing a specific type of grief is worth more than a general introduction to grief. Specificity and depth command higher prices, and practitioners, by training, tend to go deep.

Understand the three pricing traps practitioners fall into

Most therapists and coaches pricing their first course fall into one of three traps:

• The race to the bottom. Pricing low because it feels safer, more accessible, or less exposed. The thinking goes: if it's cheap, people won't expect too much. But low pricing often attracts the wrong clients, undermines the perceived value of your work, and leaves you needing to sell enormous volume to make it worthwhile.
• Copying someone else's price. Seeing what a well-known practitioner in your field charges and matching it, without knowing their audience size, their reputation, their production costs, or how long it took them to get there. Someone else's price is their number, arrived at through their context. It tells you very little about yours.
• Pricing by the hour. Translating your 1:1 hourly rate into an estimate of how long the course took to make, then pricing accordingly. This is perhaps the most common mistake, and it actively works against you, because the value of a course is not in the time it took to create. It is in the outcome it delivers, which you can now deliver to many people simultaneously without trading any more of your time.

A simple framework for finding your number

Here is a practical starting point:

• What is the outcome worth to the person buying it? If your course helps someone avoid burnout and stay in practice for another ten years, what is that worth? If it helps them process something they have been carrying for years, what is that worth? You are not charging that full amount, but anchoring to the value of the outcome gives you a ceiling to work down from, rather than a floor to work up from.
• What is the comparable 1:1 investment? If working with you 1:1 to achieve a similar result would cost €600–€900, a course priced at €197–€297 is genuinely good value, and that framing is available to you in your marketing without being pushy about it.
• What does your audience expect to pay? This is where knowing your ideal client matters. A course aimed at other practitioners with professional development budgets sits differently to one aimed at members of the general public managing a personal challenge. Neither is wrong, but they are different markets with different price sensitivities.
• What feels stretchy but not reckless? There is a version of your price that makes you slightly nervous, not terrified, but genuinely committed. That is usually closer to the right number than the version that feels completely safe.

What about discounts, early bird pricing, and payment plans?

A few practical notes on the mechanics:

• Early bird pricing can work well for a first launch, it rewards your warmest audience and creates genuine urgency. Set a clear end date and honour it.
• Payment plans make higher-priced courses more accessible without reducing the overall investment. A course at €497 with a two-payment option of €265 each is still €497 - just spread out. Many practitioners find that payment plans increase conversions significantly.
• Discounting after launch as a habit devalues your work and trains your audience to wait for the sale. The occasional promotional moment is fine. Chronic discounting is not.

One more thing, and it matters

Pricing is not a permanent decision. Your first launch price is not your forever price. Most practitioners underprice their first course, learn from the launch, improve the product, and raise the price for the next cohort or the evergreen version. That is completely normal and entirely sensible.

What matters most is that you launch. An imperfectly priced course that is out in the world is infinitely more useful than a perfectly priced one that never gets published because you spent six months deciding on the number.

If you want support working this out

Pricing decisions sit at the intersection of your business model, your ideal client, and your own relationship with money and value, which means they are rarely just a numbers question. If you find yourself going in circles on this, it is worth talking it through with someone who understands both the strategic and the psychological side of it.

That is exactly what the mentoring side of my practice is designed for. You can also book a Connection Call to have a conversation first and see if it is the right fit.

Ready to work out your pricing?

Book a Connection Call and let's look at your offer, your audience, and what your first course should actually cost.

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