Nobody Tells You What Coaching Should Cost
Ask what coaching costs and you get the most useless answer in the world: it depends.
And it does. A newly certified coach might charge eighty dollars a session. A former operator who guides founders through fundraises might charge two thousand, and keep a waitlist. Between those two numbers is a span so wide it isn't really a price at all — it's a shrug.
Faced with that fog, most people do one of two things.
Some decide coaching must be a luxury meant for other people, and quietly close the tab. Others reach for the oldest shortcut there is — price as a stand-in for quality — and assume the two-thousand-dollar coach must be four times better than the five-hundred-dollar one. Both responses skip the only question that actually matters. Not what does coaching cost, but what is this particular stretch of road worth to me?
That's the question the Budget Calculator is built around.
It doesn't ask what you can afford in the abstract. It asks where you are, what you're trying to do, and how much of yourself you're able to put behind it right now — and then it returns a sensible range for someone in your situation. Not a quote. Not a verdict. A starting point honest enough to argue with.
The number isn't the point
The range matters less than what the tool does on the way to it.
Because the real failure in coaching spend is rarely too little or too much in isolation. It's the mismatch — the quiet distance between the size of what you're attempting and the size of what you've committed to it. A founder trying to navigate a board fight and a co-founder breakup with a coach they see once a month for a hundred dollars is underinvested, and no amount of effort in the room will close that gap. Someone who mostly wants a steady hour to think out loud, paying premium retainer rates for an intensive program built for executives mid-crisis, is overinvested — and will likely feel it as pressure rather than value.
Both people are spending. Neither is spending in proportion. That gap is almost impossible to see from inside your own situation, because you're standing too close to it. The calculator's most useful job is to hold it up where you can look at it.
How to use it
It takes a couple of minutes. You tell it whether you're thinking about coaching for your work or your life, then answer a short set of questions — your stage, what you're actually reaching for, how much time and intensity you can give it. You'll see part of the result on screen straight away; the full breakdown, including the range and the mismatch read, arrives by email so you have it to come back to.
Treat the number as a sanity check, not a target. If the range surprises you — in either direction — that surprise is the signal. It usually means the story you've been telling yourself about cost and the thing you're actually trying to do have come apart somewhere, and the next useful move is to figure out which one is wrong.
And it is deliberately blunt about its own limits. It can't quote you a real coach, it doesn't know your bank account, and it won't pretend a tidy figure settles a decision this personal. What it can do is replace it depends with something you can reason from — and make sure that, whatever you decide to spend, you're spending it on the right size of problem.
The hardest part of investing in a coach was never the money. It was knowing what the money was supposed to be for.
Find your range → Budget Calculator