Quoting a single fixed price forces a client into a yes-or-no decision, and "no" is a real possibility every time. A Good-Better-Best ladder replaces that gamble with a comparison: a client picks a tier instead of rejecting an offer outright, and most buyers land on the middle option anyway. This calculator builds that ladder — Basic, Standard, Premium — from the same income math behind a day rate, then tells you how many Standard-tier clients you'd need to hit your number.
How it works
Start from an anchor value: your target income plus your business costs, divided by your billable days. That's the same logic as pricing a day rate — it's just called an "anchor" here because three package prices get built from it instead of one.
The Standard package sits at the anchor itself: 1.0x. Basic strips the engagement down to 0.6x — less scope, less access to you, a lighter lift. Premium adds white-glove service, faster turnaround, or deeper strategic involvement at 1.8x. None of these ratios are fixed by law; they're a sensible starting point you should adjust once you know how much extra work your premium clients actually demand versus how little your basic clients need from you.
Clients needed at Standard price answers a related question. The anchor already spreads your full revenue need — target income plus business costs — across every billable day, so one billable day of work is worth exactly one anchor-priced package. Swap billing by the day for selling Standard packages instead, and this is how many of those packages it takes to bring in that same total: target income and costs, not income alone. It's rounded up, because a fraction of a client doesn't pay you anything, so the count typically lands at or just above your billable-days number — it's reconstructing the same revenue target from a different unit of sale.
Worked example
Say you want to take home $90,000 net from this line of business this year, your costs to run it are $6,000, and you can bill 220 days.
- Anchor day value: ($90,000 + $6,000) ÷ 220 = $96,000 ÷ 220 = $436.3636…
- Basic package (0.6x): $436.3636… × 0.6 = $261.82
- Standard package (1.0x): $436.3636… × 1.0 = $436.36
- Premium package (1.8x): $436.3636… × 1.8 = $785.45
- Clients needed at Standard: ($90,000 + $6,000) ÷ $436.36 = 220.0018…, rounded up to 221
Every package price is rounded from the same unrounded anchor, not from each other — that's why Premium isn't exactly 3x Basic once you check the cents. The 221 clients figure counts income and costs, by design: it's how many Standard sales, at the rounded $436.36 price, it takes to reproduce the same $96,000 that 220 billable days were built to cover. It lands one above the day count here only because rounding the anchor to the cent shaves a fraction of a cent off every sale, so it takes one extra to close that gap.
How to interpret your result
Treat Standard as the number you're actually trying to sell. Basic and Premium exist to frame it — Basic makes Standard look like more value for a modest step up in price, and Premium gives price-insensitive clients somewhere to spend more without you having to build a whole different service. If most clients are choosing Basic, your Standard tier isn't differentiated enough to justify its premium; if everyone's picking Premium, you've underpriced Standard and are leaving money on the table.
Clients needed at Standard is a sanity check, not a sales forecast. It tells you whether the price and target you've set are even plausible given your capacity — 221 new full-price clients a year is a very different proposition for a solo consultant than for a boutique with a sales team. If that number looks unrealistic for how you actually sell, the fix is usually to raise Standard, sell more Premium, or extend your pricing period, not to just push harder on outreach.
None of this accounts for existing clients, retainers, or repeat business — it assumes every dollar of your target comes from fresh Standard-tier sales, which is a deliberately conservative stress test rather than a real revenue forecast.
Methodology & sources
The formula: anchorDayValue = (targetIncome + businessCosts) / billableDays, where targetIncome is the net income you want to take home and businessCosts is what it costs to run the business over that same period. Basic, Standard, and Premium are anchorDayValue × 0.6, × 1.0, and × 1.8, each rounded to the cent from the unrounded anchor. Clients needed at Standard is ceil((targetIncome + businessCosts) / standardPackage) — the full revenue need (income plus costs) divided by the rounded Standard price, rounded up because a partial client doesn't cover a partial target.
The three-tier structure follows the Good-Better-Best framework described by pricing consultant Rafi Mohammed in Harvard Business Review, The Good-Better-Best Approach to Pricing — a stripped-down option to win price-sensitive buyers, a mainstream option most people choose, and a premium option to capture the customers willing to spend more. Anchoring all three tiers to value rather than to hours worked is the core idea behind value-based pricing: price reflects what an outcome is worth to the client, not how long it took you to deliver it.