Some Money Belongs on the Table
The two failure modes of creator pricing, and the narrow road that runs between them.
The course cost more than most people’s rent.
The promise was “creator empowerment.”
The actual product was a man who had read three books on copywriting, recording himself in a rented apartment, telling people who couldn’t pay rent that they were undercharging.
That’s one failure mode of the creator economy. The other one is the indie zinester who refuses to charge anything, gives away forty hours of work for tip-jar bullshit, and calls it integrity while the electric bill goes unpaid.
Both are wrong.
Both come from the same broken thinking, which says money is a moral score and pricing is a referendum on your worth as a human being.
Strip the moralism out. Pricing is math, with ethics riding on top.
You deserve to be paid because labor has value. You also shouldn’t extract maximum dollars from people who can’t afford it. These two ideas define each other, and most creators get one of them right and miss the other completely.
I run a Gumroad catalog. Almost everything sits between two and fifteen dollars. That’s a value system.
Every product gets one specific test before I price it. Would a person working night shifts at a warehouse pay this without thinking twice?
I cater to the working man and woman who need solid advice about how to create as a small business. One that helps keep the lights on without killing yourself.
Five bucks is a gas station coffee. Twelve bucks is a movie ticket to a movie that’s probably mediocre, and if the product delivers more value than a mediocre movie, the price justifies itself. No sales page, no countdown timer, no fake urgency, no horseshit.
That’s the floor. Above it, you’re filtering out the people who’d benefit most. Below it, you’re not respecting your own work.
The premium pricing crowd will tell you cheap signals low quality. That’s a bunch of bullshit. They’re lying.
Cheap signals access. Premium signals scarcity and, frankly, elitism.
Scarcity pricing is fine if you’re selling Birkin bags. It’s grotesque if you’re selling knowledge that helps a stranger solve a problem at two in the morning.
There’s a number circulating in creator coaching circles that says you need 1,000 true fans paying $100 a year. The math works. The audience that math produces is uglier than anyone wants to admit.
A thousand people willing to drop a hundred bucks a year on you means you’ve selected for people with disposable income. Software engineers with expensive side hobbies. Dentists collecting parasocial relationships the way other people collect baseball cards.
Those people exist. They have problems some creator could solve.
The single mom doing customer service from her kitchen table is in the same world. So is the veteran on a disability check trying to start something on the side. They get priced out and we all pretend that’s normal market behavior.
Calling that normal is a choice. Pricing is audience selection, and high prices select for an audience that already has options. Low prices select for people who need the thing you made.
Pick which audience you want to serve and the pricing question answers itself.
Fairness cuts both ways. You also deserve to eat.
The instinct to undercharge or give everything away is normal, but DO NOT DO THAT. The person who can’t ask for money has not solved the moral problem. They’ve shifted the cost onto themselves.
You deserve to eat if your information is helpful.
Charge something. Even two dollars works. Zero teaches the buyer not to take you seriously.
Two dollars crosses a psychological line that zero dollars doesn’t. The buyer at two dollars has made a decision. They’ve committed, however slightly. They’ve moved from browser to buyer, and that move is the whole game.
A buyer at two dollars is worth infinitely more than a browser at zero. Most creators get this exactly backwards. They build huge free audiences, congratulate themselves on the engagement metrics, and starve.
The free-content evangelists will tell you any price is exploitation. They’re as wrong as the premium crowd, mirrored across the floor.
NOTE: This is not an argument against free or pay what you will products used for lead generation or things like that. Just use them strategically.
There’s another number that matters more than the floor, and that’s ENOUGH.
Fair pricing requires that you know how much money you need. Sit down and run the math. Rent, food, insurance, utilities, the small monthly bleed of the digital tools that keep the work running. Add a buffer for taxes and bad months. That’s your number.
Once you know the number, the path between fair-to-yourself and fair-to-your-reader gets short and obvious.
The middle position is narrow but it isn’t complicated.
Charge enough that the work sustains you, and maybe special projects or products cost more on occasion so you can thrive and build savings.
Charge little enough that the people who need the work can find out whether it helps them. Lean toward the buyer when the two pull against each other, because you hold most of the cards and the long game is built on whether they trust you not to gouge them.
The premium crowd will hate this. The free-content people will hate it too. Both camps will say I’m leaving money on the table.
That doesn’t mean I’m going to rob people or hand away the farm for free. I just need enough to buy my pizza and beer, keep the lights on, and feed my family.
I can do that and still get to where I want.
And I don’t have a bit of shame how I got there.
Joe Forrest writes Niche of One, a counterculture creator newsletter for pattern-seekers and weirdos who are allergic to guru culture. The catalog lives at store.nicheof.one.