How to price your retreat without undercharging.

The maths is simple. The belief work is harder.

I have had this conversation so many times. A practitioner has planned a beautiful retreat, done the budget, and then quietly set the ticket price about 40% below what the numbers require. Not because they made a mistake with the spreadsheet. Because somewhere in the process, a voice said: people won't pay that much. Or: I'm not well-known enough to charge that. Or the quieter one: it feels wrong to charge a lot for healing work.

That last one is the one that does the most damage, because it sounds almost virtuous.

Start with the actual numbers

Before you think about what feels right to charge, do the calculation. Add up your real costs: venue, food, team, insurance, marketing, your time in planning and delivery, travel, accommodation. Divide by the minimum number of participants you need for this to make sense. That number is your floor. Not your price — your floor.

If the event cannot work financially at that number of participants, you need to adjust something before you open bookings. Not the price — the costs, the format, or the minimum. But you need to know the floor before you can make any of those decisions.

Then think about what you are actually offering

Not the schedule. Not the venue. What actually changes for someone who comes to your retreat?

I have watched participants arrive in Nicaragua carrying things they had been carrying for years — stress, numbness, a version of themselves they had outgrown but not yet shed. And I have watched them leave lighter. More certain. More connected to themselves and to other people than they had been in a long time.

Price the outcome, not the hours. What you offer is not a service like a haircut or a plumbing job. It is a container for something that can genuinely shift a person. That has a different kind of value.

The gap between your floor and the real value of what you offer is where your price should live. Most practitioners set their price at the floor and wonder why the numbers never quite work.

On accessibility — because this always comes up

Charging fairly for your work is not the same as making your work inaccessible. Those are two separate problems and they need two separate solutions.

Undercharging is not a sustainable access strategy. It just means you burn out faster and stop hosting retreats entirely. Which helps nobody.

If accessibility matters to you — and it does to me, which is why the Mindful Earth Access Fund exists — build that in structurally. Scholarship spots. Sliding scale. A community fund. Mechanisms that allow you to charge fairly and still make space for people who need it.

That is a more honest model. And it lasts longer.

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