BREAK-EVEN & RECOMMENDED PRICE

What Is the Minimum Price You Can Charge Without Losing Money?

Pricing from competitor rates can be useful market context, but it does not tell you your own economic floor. Your break-even price starts with your costs, client volume and the share of business overhead required to deliver the service.

Short answer: For a service with clients entered, ProfitTriage calculates break-even price per client as direct costs + acquisition costs + allocated monthly business costs, divided by the number of clients. Below that modeled threshold, the service does not cover its modeled costs.

Break-even price is your floor, not your ideal price

Break-even tells you where modeled service profit reaches zero. A sustainable target normally needs room above that floor for profit, risk, reinvestment and the value of your expertise.

The ProfitTriage break-even formula

ProfitTriage allocates monthly business costs by each service's share of total work plus admin/client hours. If no hours are entered, it falls back to revenue share.

What 'Recommended Price' means in ProfitTriage

It is a modeled threshold based on your own numbers. It is not an external market-price benchmark and it does not claim to know what a specific client will accept. The purpose is to prevent the software from suggesting a price below the modeled break-even level.

Use break-even together with time economics

A service can sit above break-even and still be a weak use of capacity. Compare the price floor with Profit per Hour, Profit per Client and Capacity Doctor before deciding what to quote.

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Explore the other ProfitTriage guides

True hourly rate & workload · Profit per client · Raising prices & client risk · Break-even pricing