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Price the Moment, Not the Client’s Size

Charging Nike more than your local apparel shop isn’t value pricing. It’s entitlement. Most pricing advice says, “price the customer, not the service.” Charge big companies more than small ones. Big company, bigger budgets, higher price. Makes sense, right? Think again. This way of thinking leads to a lazy shortcut: look up the client’s revenue, charge a percentage, call it value pricing. That’s not value pricing. That’s just a fancier version of guessing and pretending it’s math. Client should pay you more just because they have it? This is the kind of thinking that also says your friend should pick up the tab for dinner because they have a higher-paying job than you. Here’s what I teach instead: price the moment, not the customer. The moment is the intersection of your situation and their situation right now. Stop looking at their company size or annual revenue. A website for a startup about to raise their Series D is worth more than a website for the same startup two years later when growth has plateaued. It’s the same company and probably even the same deliverable, but the moment is completely different, so the price should be too. A rebrand for a company that just lost a major client to a competitor is worth more than the same rebrand during a routine refresh. The urgency changes the value. Price the customer says: who’s buying? Price the moment says: why now? What’s at stake? What happens if they don’t do this? When you price the moment, you stop looking at company size and start looking at context. Because context is where the real value lives.