Raised my price 40% and lost every single client. Now I don't know what to do

Raised my charcoal portrait rate from €250 to €400 after a year of people telling me "you're too cheap, you undersell yourself." Everyone said do it. Everyone.

Lost every single client. All of them. The two commissions I had booked cancelled the next week. Three months now, nothing. I keep checking my DMs like a loser.

And the worst part is I know the work is good. It's not impostor syndrome talking, this batch of pieces is some of the best stuff I've ever made. But nobody will pay the price that's actually fair for what goes into them.

I'm sitting here genuinely considering dropping back down to €250. And I hate that because everyone warned me this is the trap, this is exactly what they said would happen, that I'd cave. But rent doesn't care about my dignity.

€250 for 22 hours of work is €11 an hour. I know that's insane. But it's food money.

Anyone else just... hit the wall and folded back to the old number? Or actually waited it out and survived?

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Elin Holm·52m

That's a hard one. I've watched a lot of people in my field do the same jump, and the advice isn't wrong about being underpaid, but it skips the part where you don't get to pick your audience on command. The people who commissioned at €250 were a specific pool, and that pool has a ceiling. Raising the price doesn't make them suddenly okay with it, it just makes you invisible to them. You need the new pool to find you first, and that takes longer than a year.

The work being your best matters, but it won't show up in a DM. It shows up in the room you're showing in, the feed you're posting to, the clients you're reaching. Maybe the answer isn't €250 or €400. Maybe it's €300 and a plan for the next year that isn't just waiting.

Not that any of that makes the empty inbox easier. It doesn't.

Sol ReyesOP·28m

Yeah. That "pool has a ceiling" line hit me hard because it's exactly the thing nobody told me. Everyone was so eager to say "you undersell yourself!" like it was that simple, and I swallowed it whole because it felt good to hear. But they weren't wrong and they weren't right either. They just didn't have to live with the aftermath.

The room thing though. I keep thinking about that. I've been posting the same way to the same feed, same hashtags, same everything, and then wondering why the new price isn't reaching anyone. Like I changed the number but not the stage I'm standing on. That's on me.

I'm not gonna drop back to €250. Not because I'm stubborn, well ok partly, but because I'd rather have dry months than do the work at a rate that makes me resent it. But you're right that I need to figure out where the new people actually are instead of standing in the same room shouting louder.

What field are you in, out of curiosity? Sounds like you've seen this play out more than once.

Ananya Iyer·46m

Oof. I felt this one. The "you're too cheap" chorus is easy to listen to because it strokes the ego, but nobody talks about the part where you can't factory-reset your whole audience overnight.

Not quite the same field, but I went from architecture to painting and had to figure out pricing from scratch. What I've learned is the jump matters less than the lane. If you've been selling to people who value a bargain, raising the price without changing who's seeing the work is basically the same product in a new shop window nobody walks past. The €250 clients were never going to become €400 clients, they were always going to leave eventually.

Maybe the middle helps, not dropping back to €250, but meeting at €300 or €325, keeping the base, and slowly pushing up as new people come in who only ever knew the higher number. And honestly, showing the process helps too. People pay for the story of making it, not just the finished face. Charcoal work especially, people love seeing the build.

Three months of silence is brutal though. I'd be spiralling too. Just don't make the decision from inside the spiral, na. Give it a week.

Sol ReyesOP·24m

The "new shop window nobody walks past" thing is so painfully accurate it almost hurts 😭 that's exactly it. I put the same paintings behind a higher price tag and somehow expected different people to walk in. Like the work would just... find its people on its own.

And that architecture to painting jump is no joke. Learning pricing from scratch while also learning to trust your own eye? That's two battles at once. How long did it take you to find your actual lane and not just guess?

The part I keep circling is the gap. Not even the money, the gap between what I know the work is worth and what the market I built is willing to pay. Feels like I have to either shrink the work or find a whole new room for it. I'm not ready to shrink it.