To calculate what your offer is worth to the buyer, multiply the hours the problem costs them each week by the value of their hour, add what they already spend on partial fixes, and annualize the total. That yearly figure is the cost of not solving the problem, and your price should be a small slice of it.
Why Creator Pricing Is Almost Always Wrong made the argument: a price is a comparison, and the right comparison is the buyer's own cost of leaving the problem alone. This post is the arithmetic. It takes about 45 minutes, a calculator, and a handful of honest answers from real buyers.
Step 1: Find the weekly time cost
Start with the number buyers can actually give you: hours per week. Not "a lot." Not "it's exhausting." A number.
Ask five to ten people who match your buyer one question: "How many hours a week does this cost you, honestly?" Use the median, not the most dramatic reply. One person who says "15 hours" will pull your math into fiction, and a skeptical buyer will spot it instantly.
If you've already been through the language bank exercise, some of these answers are sitting in your replies and DMs already, in the buyer's own words.
In the newsletter-writer case that AI Offer Crafter analyzed, the repeated problem was rewriting AI drafts from scratch every week because the output lost the writer's voice. The tool's working assumption was 3 hours a week of rebuilding context by hand.
Step 2: Put a conservative value on the hour
Multiply the weekly hours by what an hour is worth to that buyer. Pick the lowest rate you can defend, and say out loud that it's conservative.
The same example used $50 an hour, deliberately modest for someone who writes for a living:
3 hours × $50 = $150 a week
$150 × 52 = $7,800 a year
Conservative matters more than it sounds. A buyer who reads "$7,800, and that assumes only $50 an hour" thinks it's probably more than that. A buyer who reads an inflated figure starts looking for the flaw.
If you can't tell what a buyer's hour is worth, ask what they'd pay a freelancer to take the task off their plate. Either answer beats leaving the hour unpriced.
Step 3: Add what they already spend, and what hiring it done costs
Time is the floor. Two other numbers sharpen the picture:
- Money already spent on partial fixes. Prompt packs, templates, a course that half worked, a subscription they keep paying for. In the example, the cheap alternatives ran $50 to $150 and still left the problem standing.
- The hire-it-done cost. What a freelancer or consultant would charge to make the problem go away directly. For the example, a custom build session with a consultant runs roughly $450 to $1,500.
You now have three anchors, and you don't need all three to price. You need at least one you can defend in a sentence. Money already spent is the strongest, because the buyer has already proven they'll pay. Time cost is the weakest, because nobody feels a wasted hour the way they feel a charge on a card. This is exactly why the stress test flags a buyer who has never paid for anything.
Step 4: Set the price as a payback period
Now flip the question. Instead of "what should I charge?", ask "how quickly does the buyer get this back?"
| Price | Buyer's yearly cost | Payback |
|---|---|---|
| $247 | $7,800 | about 1.6 weeks of the cost |
| $697 | $7,800 | under 1 month |
| $1,497 | $7,800 | about 2.3 months |
Those are the three tiers AI Offer Crafter produced for that run, and each one reads as a payback period rather than a price. A useful rule of thumb: if the buyer recovers the price within one to three months of their current cost, it feels like an obvious trade. If it takes most of a year, either the problem isn't big enough or the price is too high.
Two honest caveats. The $7,800 figure is an assumption built from a stated hourly rate, not a measured outcome, and the tool labels it that way. And a payback period only works if the offer really removes the cost. Whether it does is a separate question, which the 12-question stress test exists to answer before you charge anyone.
What the calculation is not
It isn't a promise of ROI to the buyer, and you shouldn't write it as one. It's your reasoning for the price, shown openly: here is what this costs you today, here is what I'm asking, here is the comparison. Buyers can disagree with your assumptions, and that's fine. A price they can argue with in specifics beats a price they can only argue with in general.
Frequently asked questions
How do you calculate what your offer is worth to the buyer?
Multiply the hours the problem costs the buyer each week by the value of their hour, add anything they already spend on partial fixes, and annualize it. That yearly figure is the cost of not solving the problem. Your price should be a small, easily defended fraction of it, ideally recovered in the first month or two.
What percentage of the buyer's cost should I charge?
There is no universal percentage, but a useful test is the payback period: if the price is recovered in one to three months of the buyer's current cost, the price reads as an obvious trade. The newsletter-writer example in this post prices at $697 against $7,800 a year, under one month of the cost. If your price needs more than a year to pay back, the offer needs a bigger problem or a lower price.
What if I can't put a dollar value on the buyer's time?
Use a conservative stand-in and say so. Ask the buyer what they earn per hour, what they would pay a freelancer to do the task, or use the lowest defensible rate. A deliberately low assumption still gives you a number to point at, and a conservative number is harder to argue with than an inflated one.
Does this work if the buyer isn't currently paying for anything?
Only partly. Time cost still gives you an anchor, but a buyer who has never spent money on the problem is a warning sign in the offer stress test, not just a pricing problem. Time cost alone is a weaker anchor than money already spent, because buyers rarely feel wasted hours the way they feel a charge on a card.
Where to go from here
For the argument behind this arithmetic, read Why Creator Pricing Is Almost Always Wrong. To check that the offer you're pricing survives scrutiny first, start with The 12 Questions Every Creator Offer Must Survive.
Next in this cluster: the Good/Better/Best structure that turns one buyer-cost number into three tiers.