Your price guide is an essential part of your profile, giving customers a ballpark figure for what they can expect when they ask you for a quote. Note: on Encore, adding prices does not commit you to charging those rates when a customer gets in touch - you provide a fresh quote for every customer.
If you're unsure about whether you should add pricing, check out our pricing guide.
How to add your pricing
- Your profile must be 'Gig-ready' to add pricing information
- Head to your Profit editor
- Select 'Price guide' tab
- Add your pricing information here
Guide to the Price Guides Section
Standard pricing
This is where you list your typical price for your services. Note, these prices should include everything you need to put on a typical performance. If you usually bring PA, they should include this cost. If you are VAT registered, they should include VAT.
We know it’s unusual for musicians to perform longer than an hour without a break, so all performance durations include one 15 mins break per hour by default. For example, your quote for 2 x 45mins would be under the performance duration “Up to 2 hours”.
Time-sensitive pricing
We know that you might vary your pricing depending on the time of year, the day of the week, or even the time of day. For example, most musicians would charge less for a 2pm gig on a Monday in February than they would for 7pm on the Saturday before Christmas.
So we’ve given you the option of including information in your Price guide to let us know when your prices might be slightly lower. At the moment this won’t be displayed to clients, but we will be building a client-facing feature based on the information you enter here in future.
By default, we’ll list a message on your profile during peak seasons like weekends in the summer or bank holidays to let clients know your prices might be higher than usual.
We want to be careful when it comes to lowering prices as we don’t want to encourage undercutting. For the moment, if you do lower your prices during certain dates or times, please check the box “[]” and explain how. We’ll use this information to build a more sophisticated calculator for your time-sensitive pricing fluctuations in future.
Custom prices
We’ve built custom prices to allow to add your fees for booking types which don’t fit into the standard rate format. Typical examples might be events where you have to perform multiple times in successions like wedding ceremonies, or unusually short gigs (like piping in a haggis on Burns Night).
Add-on prices
Use add-ons to list all the additional services you can provide alongside your standard performance. Here are a few examples of add-ons.
- Cosmetic add-ons: bringing a grand piano shell, or an extra outfit change
- Upgraded AV: louder PA, a lighting rig, a smoke machine
- Additional music: composing or arranging a song for the client
- Upgraded service: giving your client a Skype consultation call or inviting them to listen to a rehearsal before the event
Travel
Your travel expenses are likely to vary from gig to gig depending on how easy it is to share lifts, or how good the transport links are to the event. But to give your client an idea of how much your travel arrangements will cost, we’ve made a simple calculator. Simply add in your typical price per mile and we’ll automatically show you how much your travel expenses would be for a 10-, 50-, or 100-mile roundtrip. Note: a 10-mile round trip would be for a gig 5 miles away.
How is my pricing displayed to clients?
Once you’ve completed your Price guide, it will be displayed on your public-facing profile. These prices won’t appear on your profile when you’re applying for jobs or after you’ve quoted. They only appear for customers who are searching and haven’t made an enquiry yet.
Though we’ll update this in future, currently some of the information we ask for won’t be displayed publicly. We wanted to release this as soon as possible, so in this first version, clients only see the most essential info.
Information we’ll display with the next update:
- Travel expenses – we’ll use this in future to estimate how expensive your travel would be based on where a client’s event is.
- Time-sensitive pricing – we won’t display this information to the client but will use it in future to improve the way pricing works.
