The hours you do not think of as work
Four two-hour sessions reads as eight hours. Then you write the handout, shop for supplies, portion them into eight kits, arrive early to set the room, stay late to clean it and answer messages between sessions. An hour a session is conservative and it makes the real figure twelve. Divide the same fee by eight hours instead of twelve and your hourly rate is inflated by half.
That is why prep is a separate field here rather than an adjustment. If building the curriculum was a large one-time job, divide those hours across the sessions and add them in; if you intend to run the same course several times, divide by the number of runs you honestly expect. Any of those is better than leaving the field at zero, which is the only answer that is definitely wrong.
Break-even seats, and what eleven of them means
Split the costs into the ones that do not care how many people come — the room, the advertising — and the ones that arrive with each student, which is materials plus the percentage the platform takes. Each seat contributes its price less the per-student costs. Break-even seats is the fixed pile divided by that contribution.
Take $800 of venue and promotion, a $95 seat and $22 of materials, with no platform cut. Each seat contributes $73. Eight hundred divided by seventy-three is 10.96, so eleven students. Eleven, on a day when you have taught for nothing — that is the point at which you stop losing money, not the point at which you get paid.
Say the rest of it plainly: a class that only breaks even at full capacity is priced too low. Not aggressive, not ambitious — too low. It means every run hangs on the last two signups, which are the ones that arrive late, cancel most and never come at all in a bad month. There is no version of that class that survives a slow season, and running it teaches you nothing except that you can fill a room.
What the target rate is doing in the formula
The price here is solved backwards. Take your hours times the rate you want for them, add the materials for the students you expect and the fixed costs of the run, then divide by expected students times the fraction of each payment that survives refunds and fees. Everything hinges on the expected number, and that is deliberate: at half capacity the price roughly doubles, which is the honest consequence of a class that does not fill.
Setting the target rate to zero gives you the floor — the price that covers costs and pays you nothing. First runs are sometimes priced there on purpose, in exchange for photographs and reviews. It is a defensible choice once. It is hard to climb out of, because the second cohort has heard the first price.
If teaching is one strand of a freelance income, the hourly figure needs to clear what your other work pays after its own unbilled hours. The hourly value calculator works that out including the time around the work, and the freelance rate calculator goes the other way, from a target income back to a rate.
Cancellations move the price for everyone
Eight people book, two cancel, and the materials for eight were bought on Tuesday. You refund what you promised, the supplies are gone, and the shortfall is real. Building an allowance into the price is the only way that arithmetic closes, and this page does exactly that — which also makes visible that the six who came paid for the two who did not.
The lever that works is not a stricter refund rule, which may not be yours to set. It is sequencing: confirm the roster, then buy the materials; publish a minimum headcount and the date you will cancel by; take a deposit that reflects what you commit to before the first session. Those reduce how often the allowance is needed rather than shifting it around.
More seats or a higher price
Once the room and the advertising are covered, an extra student is close to pure contribution, so the headcount table climbs steeply on the right. That makes filling the room look like the obvious move. For a class where you go around the table and correct people's hands, it is not: the eleventh student changes what the fourth one gets, and that shows up in whether there is a next cohort.
Raising the price trades volume for margin. Twenty percent more per seat with twenty percent fewer students leaves gross revenue about level but cuts materials and attention load, so the money left over rises. Forty percent fewer and it does not. Where that line sits for a given class is what the price increase simulator computes.
If the price comes out above what people around you charge
Two possibilities and they need different responses. One is that an input is optimistic — expected signups near capacity, prep hours near zero, or a studio counted as free. Fix those and the number usually comes down.
The other is that the local going rate does not pay for preparation, and everyone teaching at it is absorbing those hours unpaid. That happens often in craft and hobby teaching, and knowing it is the situation is worth more than a price you cannot charge. The usual responses are to change the shape rather than the number: fewer sessions with more in each, a smaller room with a higher price, materials billed separately, or the class treated openly as marketing for the thing you actually sell. If it is the last of those, price it as marketing and stop measuring it as income. What the class sells afterwards belongs in the margin calculator, and if it feeds a product line, the ordering side is on the inventory order calculator.
Questions people ask
How do I set this up for a single one-off workshop?
Put 1 in the sessions field. The thing to watch is that prep becomes a much larger share of the total: a three-hour workshop with two hours of preparation is five hours of your time, not three, so the price the calculator returns is far above what the room-hours alone would suggest. That is usually the honest explanation for why one-off workshops feel busy and pay poorly. Everything else works the same, and materials should still be entered as the whole amount one student consumes.
Should materials be inside the ticket price or billed separately?
The arithmetic is identical either way — bill them separately and you enter zero for materials per student, then quote the kit fee alongside the price this returns. Bundling means one payment and a simpler listing. Separating lets students choose an upgraded kit and makes the price look lower next to competitors who bundle. The part worth deciding in advance, in writing, is who carries the cost of a kit already made up when someone cancels, because that is the situation where the two structures actually differ.
My own studio costs me nothing extra, so why enter a space cost?
Because the hours are not free even when the invoice is. If you pay rent on the space, the share of it covering the hours the class occupies is a real cost of running the class. If you could have rented those hours out, or taught something else in them, that foregone amount is what the class is really costing you to hold. Entering zero does not remove the cost, it just moves it into the profit line where you cannot see it, and the effect is that a class which is quietly subsidised by the studio looks like it pays.
What if I enter a target rate of zero?
You get the lowest price that covers space, promotion, materials and fees — the same threshold as the break-even seat count, expressed as a price rather than a headcount. It is a reasonable floor for a first run where you want photographs, testimonials and the experience of teaching the thing. Treat it as a one-time decision rather than a starting point, because raising a published price later meets more resistance than opening slightly higher and discounting the first cohort.
Cancellations aside, how should I handle a class that does not reach minimum?
Decide the minimum and the cancellation date before you take the first payment, and put both in the listing. The calculator tells you what that minimum is: it is the break-even seat count, below which running the class costs you money on top of the unpaid hours. Announcing that you will confirm or cancel by a fixed date a week out lets you refund cleanly, avoids buying materials for a class that will not run, and is easier to say to people than a decision made the night before.