Why we publish prices

Our prices are on the page. All of them — the start fee, the per-booking fee, the success fee, the refresh tiers. There’s a calculator that will tell you what your own retreat would cost before you speak to anyone.

That shouldn’t be remarkable. In this market, it is.

The short version

Ask what something costs in this category and you’ll usually get one of four answers:

1. A published price. Rare.
2. “From $X.” A number chosen to be the smallest true thing that can be said.
3. “Contact us for a custom quote.” A price exists. You’re not allowed to see it yet.
4. Nothing at all. No pricing page, no range, no signal.

We went looking for what platforms in the adjacent retreat market actually publish, and found all four — including a major booking platform whose organizer terms confirm a commission exists, state that it will be “indicated to the Organizer before the Organizer publishes an Experience Offer,” and never say what it is. The rate is real. It’s just disclosed privately, per listing, after you’ve invested time.

That’s the pattern. Not dishonesty — a deliberate decision to make you spend something before you learn the number.

What “contact us for pricing” is protecting

It’s worth being fair about this, because there are real reasons and they’re not all cynical.

The honest reason: scope genuinely varies. A retreat with a working page and a healthy list needs different work from one starting from nothing. A firm quote requires knowing which you are. That’s true, and it’s why our own start fee has a range rather than a single number.

The commercial reason: price is easier to accept after value. Standard sales advice — a number stated cold gets compared to other numbers, while a number stated after forty-five minutes of rapport gets compared to the problem it solves. That’s not a lie, but notice who it’s designed to benefit.

The reason nobody says out loud: it allows the price to vary by buyer. If the number isn’t published, it can be higher for the person who seems able to pay it. Sometimes that’s principled — sliding scale, mission discount. Often it isn’t.

And the practical reason: it filters. Making people ask means only motivated people ask. It’s a qualification mechanism paid for entirely with the buyer’s time.

What it costs you

Time, in the currency you have least of. To compare three vendors you need three calls, each around an hour, each scheduled a week out. Three hours plus a fortnight to learn three numbers you could have read in three minutes.

Position. You arrive at the number having already invested time, which is exactly when it’s hardest to walk away. That’s not an accident.

Certainty. A price you had to ask for is a price that could have been different. You’ll never know whether it was.

Comparability. When nobody publishes, you can’t compare — which suits everyone selling and nobody buying.

What we do instead

Everything is on the page, including the parts that are less flattering to us.

• The start fee, and the fact that it’s set by how much time you give us. More runway means a lower start fee, because more runway genuinely costs us less to deliver. Less runway costs more. That’s on the calculator.
• The per-booking fee and the success fee, and that the success fee only applies if the retreat actually runs.
• What we charge on — only bookings we bring you above what you already had. Seats you’d already sold are yours; we don’t earn on them.
• The worst case. The calculator shows what you’d owe if the retreat doesn’t reach its minimum and doesn’t run. Most pricing pages show you the good outcome. The bad one is the number you actually need.
• What isn’t included. Your domain, your email, your ad spend — in your name, paid by you, so it stays yours.
• The minimum term on ongoing work, next to the price rather than in a contract you see later.

You can put your own numbers in and get an estimate without giving us your email address.

The obvious objection

If you publish, don’t you lose the chance to explain yourself first?

Yes. And we’d rather lose that than have someone spend an hour on a call to discover we were never in their range.

Publishing costs us some conversations that might have converted after a good pitch. It saves an enormous number of conversations that were never going to work. On balance we come out ahead, and the people we do speak to arrive already knowing the number and wanting to talk about the work.

There’s a second reason, less comfortable and more important: we sell on the promise that nothing is held hostage — your site, your list, your accounts, and nothing that switches off if we part ways. A studio that won’t tell you its price until you’ve earned the right to hear it is not a studio you should believe about ownership. The pricing page is the first test of whether we mean it.

How to read anyone else’s pricing

Not just ours. This is a useful checklist for any vendor in this category:

• Is there a number, or a range, anywhere public? If not, ask why, and notice how they answer.
• What does “from” attach to? Ask what the last three clients actually paid. A “from” price with no median is a marketing number.
• What’s excluded? Ad spend, hosting, domains, third-party tools. Excluded costs are where a cheap quote gets expensive.
• Is there a minimum term? If yes, is it stated next to the price or in the contract?
• What happens on the day you leave? Who holds the domain, the site, the list, the ad account. This is the question that reveals the most and gets asked the least.
• Does the price appear consistently everywhere? Different numbers on different pages means one of them is stale — and stale prices favour whoever’s quoting them.

If a vendor answers all six without discomfort, the price is probably real.

Common questions

Doesn’t publishing prices mean you get undercut? Sometimes. Someone will always be cheaper. We’re not trying to win that comparison — and a buyer choosing purely on price was never going to be a good fit for work that depends on trust.

Why is your start fee a range instead of one number? Because the honest answer depends on your runway and whether you’re starting from scratch. The calculator resolves it to a single number once you put your date in — the range exists on the page, not in the negotiation.

Do you ever discount? No. A published price that’s negotiable isn’t a published price, and it means whoever pushed hardest paid least.

What if I can’t afford it? Then we’ll tell you, quickly, and you’ll have lost a few minutes instead of a fortnight. Start with the free audit — the findings are yours to keep and act on, whoever you end up hiring.

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Every observation about other companies’ pricing practices in this article comes from publicly posted pages and terms of service. We’ve named no competitor, and we’d encourage you to check ours the same way.