How We Set Prices by Market and by Budget

Pricing a service across countries is where most small advisories quietly give up and improvise. We did too, for a while. This is how we stopped, and what we would tell you if you were building your own.

The problem we found in our own price list

We had converted our India fees into other currencies at a flat exchange rate, then added a premium for Gulf and Eastern European clients. The premium was not documented. When we finally checked, it ranged from about 1.07x to 1.55x depending on the service, with no reason recorded for any of it.

Nothing about that was dishonest. It was the residue of individual quotes that each felt reasonable at the time. But a price list you cannot explain is a price list you cannot defend, and every new quote made it worse.

Principle 1: one base, everything else derived

We picked one market, India, as the base. Every other market is calculated from it with one formula, so a price in any market can be explained with a single sentence and reproduced by anyone.

Principle 2: track ability to pay, but not all of it

The formula anchors on public data: GDP per capita adjusted for purchasing power, from the IMF World Economic Outlook.

We do not scale linearly with it. Linear scaling would put a client in one of the richest Gulf economies at more than six times an Indian client's fee, and that overstates what a marketing retainer tracks. Buyers of professional services respond to what they can afford and what they expect to pay, not to a full cost-of-living index built for a basket of consumer goods.

So the ratio is compressed with a fractional exponent. We chose the exponent because it reproduced, almost exactly, the premium one market was already paying under the old ad hoc method, which told us the compression was calibrated sensibly.

Principle 3: location is only half the answer. Budget is the other half.

A price ladder built only on geography misses the more common problem: a client whose entire marketing budget is smaller than your entry fee.

We had a real prospect in exactly that position. Our entry-level audit alone would have cost more than everything they spent on marketing in a month, before any work started. Quoting them would have been either a rejection or an insult.

So we run two lanes:

• Flagship is for funded businesses that can sustain a retainer floor. The route is diagnostic, paid audit, then a workshop or retainer.
• À la carte is for small brands whose total budget would not clear that floor. The route is diagnostic straight into a scoped engagement on one or two pillars. There is no separate audit fee, because the free diagnostic already does the triage the audit would do.

Deciding the lane is the first pricing decision, before any number is quoted.

Principle 4: price ad management against spend bands

For paid media, the management fee is a flat monthly amount set by a band of total ad budget, agreed at signing and reviewed every six months. Ad spend itself is billed by the platform directly to the client, so our fee covers our service and nothing else.

Bands beat percentages for a simple reason. A percentage rewards us for the client spending more, which is a conflict of interest we would rather not carry. A band does not move when the budget does within it.

Principle 5: some prices are deliberately not formula-driven

The à la carte lane does not get the market premium. It stays at plain exchange-rate parity everywhere. That is a policy choice: it is the entry point for the most budget-constrained clients in any country, and adding a premium would work against the point of having it.

The lesson for your own model is that a formula gets a rule for every exception, written down, or it gets quietly overridden.

Principle 6: put a date on the whole table

Two things we do every time we touch it:

• The data is dated. We refresh against each new IMF release, roughly every six months.
• Real deals recalibrate it. As client work comes in from each market, we check the multiplier against what buyers there actually accept.

We also note the simplifications. One region in our table blends several very different economies into one multiplier. That is a known shortcut, and it is written down as one.

If you are building your own

1. Pick one base market and write it down as the base.
2. Derive every other market with one formula that you can explain in a sentence.
3. Compress the raw purchasing-power ratio, and record why.
4. Split your offer into lanes by client budget, not only by geography.
5. Price variable services against bands, not percentages of spend.
6. Write down each deliberate exception.
7. Put a review date on the whole table.

The point is that every number can be traced back to a reason, so any quote can be explained, defended and revisited.