When pricing your creative or heart-centered services, it’s crucial to separate your effort from your worth, because the cost of underpricing is far greater than you think.

Here are four specific ways underpricing affects your business:
1. Attracts low-quality customers
2. Damages your brand reputation
3. Reduces your profit margins
4. Creates an unsustainable business model

Let’s talk about why.

💥 1. Attracts Low-Quality Customers

Underpricing is a magnet for clients who want a deal, not a transformation. These bargain-hunters often expect the moon on a shoestring and will nickel-and-dime you until your boundaries blur. What starts as a small discount snowballs into scope creep, late payments, and draining your energy.

These aren’t the clients who rave about your work or respect your process. They’re the ones who ghost, nitpick, or bounce as soon as you raise your rates. And while they are still wrestling with the value they bring to the table themselves, that doesn’t mean that their trauma should be your trauma. 

🚫 2. Damages Your Brand Reputation

Like it or not, your pricing sends a message. If you’re offering premium-level results at bargain-bin prices, people start to wonder what’s “wrong.” And not just your clients, referral partners, peers, and competitors notice, too.

Low pricing can make your brand feel unsure, inexperienced, or even desperate, none of which is true for you. But perception matters. You want to be positioned as a trusted expert, not the cheapest option.

📉 3. Reduces Your Profit Margins

This one’s obvious but painful. Underpricing cuts into your margins, fast. That $97 service you poured 6 hours into? After expenses, software, taxes, and your own energy, you might be walking away with…$14.32. Ouch. And unacceptable if you want to grow a sustainable business versus a side hustle.

Profit is not a dirty word. Society has made us feel guilty for having profit and building wealth. In all honesty, Profit is what allows you to pay your team well, move into a new space without feeling the crunch, buy new equipment, build your retirement, invest in growth, and take a real vacation.

🔄 4. Creates an Unsustainable Business Model

When your pricing doesn’t match your expenses, you’re not just under-earning—you’re building a business on borrowed time.

Let’s be honest: You either have to double your client load just to pay the bills, or you end up sacrificing the very things that matter most: your health, your sleep, your weekends, your relationships.

And for what? To keep clients happy at your own expense?

This is how resentment creeps in. You start dreading the work you once loved. Your spark dims. And the vision you had for freedom, flexibility, and legacy turns into 16-hour days and burnout that no amount of coffee or affirmations can fix.

It’s not sustainable. It’s not kind. And it’s not what you set out to build.

Running a business should feel empowering, even in the chaos.

When your pricing finally reflects the real cost of doing business (time, labor, tech, taxes, profit, your own well-being), everything shifts. You get to serve your clients from a full cup. You regain time to think, rest, dream, and grow.

🔧 It’s Time to Recalibrate

If any of these hit too close to home, you’re not alone. At My CFO, we help business owners take an honest look at their numbers and rebuild their pricing from a place of clarity, value, and strategy.

📊 Want help calculating what your offers should cost using the EPI Formula (Expenses + Profit = Income)?

📩 Fill out the contact form or email us. Let’s fix the foundation so your pricing stops draining you and starts empowering you.

Because at the end of the day, cash flow isn’t luck, it’s strategy. 🧡💸🦄