How to price treatments: à la carte, packages and memberships
The short answer. Pricing is not a number you copy, it is a structure you design. Copying a competitor’s price copies their cost base — their rent, their staffing, their treatment times — and you cannot see any of it.
The unit that matters is not the treatment. It is the hour of room time the treatment consumes, because that is the thing you have a fixed amount of.
We publish no prices here. What follows is how to build the structure: the three formats and what each is for, how to arrive at a number for your own clinic, when and how to raise, and the discounting habit that undoes all of it.
Price the hour, not the treatment
Two treatments with very different headline prices can contribute the same, or invert, once you account for the time they take and the product they consume. A ninety-minute service at a high price may contribute less per hour than a thirty-minute one at a modest price — and the room does not care which you performed.
So for every service, work out its contribution: price, minus product, minus the cost of the person delivering it. Then divide by the hours it occupies. That figure — contribution per treatment hour — is what should shape the menu, the scheduling, and which services you actively promote. It is the same denominator that drives the break-even calculation.
Two consequences fall out immediately:
- Treatment time is a pricing lever. Shaving ten minutes off a protocol without harming the result raises contribution per hour more reliably than a price increase, and no client objects to it.
- Your most-promoted service should not be chosen by margin percentage. A high-margin treatment that occupies the room all afternoon can earn less than a modest one you can deliver four times.
The three formats, and what each is for
| Format | What it does for the client | What it does for you | The risk |
|---|---|---|---|
| À la carte | No commitment, easy to try | Full price, full flexibility, simplest to administer | Every month starts at zero. Fragile on its own |
| Packages or courses | A better rate, and a reason to complete a protocol that works better completed | Cash up front and a steadier calendar | A price fixed today, delivered over months at tomorrow’s costs — and capacity already sold |
| Memberships | A predictable monthly relationship and a habit | The most predictable revenue, and it raises what the business is worth | Hardest to sell, and it must be worth having every month or it churns |
Most clinics need all three, in different proportions at different stages. A new clinic leans on à la carte because that is what strangers buy; a maturing one shifts weight into courses and memberships because that is what turns a calendar into a floor. The mechanics of the prepaid side — and the obligation it creates — are in prepaid packages and gift cards.
How to arrive at a number
- Work out what an hour of room time costs you. Total monthly fixed costs divided by the room-hours you can realistically sell. This is the floor beneath everything.
- Add the direct cost of the service — product, consumables, and the practitioner’s time.
- Decide the contribution you need per hour for the clinic to work at achievable utilisation, not at optimistic utilisation.
- Check the market, in both languages, in your actual catchment. Not the city average — the clinics your clients would otherwise drive to.
- Choose a position and be able to say it in one sentence. “We are more expensive than X because Y” is a strategy. “We are somewhere in the middle” is not.
- Test on new clients first. A new price is easy for someone who never knew the old one, and hard for someone who did.
Step four is worth doing properly and in both languages, because the same treatment is often advertised at different levels to francophone and anglophone audiences in the same city, and the gap tells you something about who is competing for whom.
Discounting is a pricing decision, not a promotion
A package discount is a price cut you grant today and deliver over months, at costs you do not yet know. That is fine when it is deliberate and sized so you can still deliver profitably. It stops being fine when it becomes the default.
Habitual discounting teaches clients that the sale price is the real price. Once learned, that is very hard to unteach, it permanently lowers the margin the business plan assumed, and it is the seventh pattern in why clinics fail — the one that is usually a symptom before it becomes a cause.
Three things to reach for before a discount:
- Off-peak pricing rather than across-the-board pricing. You have hours that are genuinely worth less to you; sell those, not the Saturday.
- Added value instead of subtracted price — a product, an add-on, a longer session. It costs you less than the equivalent discount and it does not reset the reference price.
- A reason and an end date. An offer with a stated occasion and a deadline does not become the new price. A standing “special” does.
Raising prices
Prices should move when your costs move, when demand consistently exceeds your capacity, or when you deliberately reposition. Waiting until it is urgent means raising by more, at a worse moment.
A few practicalities:
- Give notice, apply the new price to new bookings, and honour what clients have already prepaid at the price they paid.
- Expect a price rise to make outstanding prepaid sessions more expensive to deliver — which is a reason to know that balance in hours before you decide.
- Do not apologise for it in the announcement. Explain it once, plainly, and move on.
- Update everything at once: the site, the booking system, printed material and the front desk. A price that is different in two places is worse than either price.
Displaying prices
Whatever you charge, what you show the public is customer-facing material and carries obligations. Prices displayed to consumers in Quebec are subject to consumer-protection rules administered by the Office de la protection du consommateur, and the language of what you display falls under the requirements set out by the Office québécois de la langue française. How taxes are handled in what you quote is a question for your accountant and for Revenu Québec.
A practical note that is not a legal one: publishing prices tends to help more than it hurts. Clients who bounce off a published price were unlikely to book; clients who have to call to find out often do not call.
Four things not to do
- Set prices once and never revisit them. Costs move every year whether the menu does or not.
- Match a competitor whose cost base you cannot see. Their rent, room count and staffing are invisible to you and they determine everything.
- Discount to rescue a quiet month when the redemptions will land in the busy one, displacing full-price work. Timing, not price, is what makes that a loss.
- Price the treatment you wish clients booked rather than the one they actually book. Weight the menu towards reality — see how a clinic earns.
Once the structure is set, put it into the business plan and re-run break-even on the mix you actually expect to sell rather than on your flagship service.
Frequently asked
How should a med spa set its prices?
Start from what an hour of room time costs you, add the direct cost of the service, decide the contribution you need at achievable utilisation, then check your actual catchment in both languages and choose a position you can state in one sentence. Copying a competitor copies a cost base you cannot see.
Should I price by treatment or by time?
By the hour the treatment consumes. Two services with very different headline prices can contribute the same or invert once time and product are counted, and room-hours are the thing you have a fixed amount of.
Are packages or memberships better?
They do different jobs. Packages bring cash up front and steady the calendar but fix tomorrow’s price at today’s and commit capacity. Memberships are the most predictable and raise what the business is worth, but they are the hardest to sell and must stay worth having every month.
When should I raise prices?
When costs move, when demand consistently exceeds capacity, or when you reposition deliberately. Give notice, apply it to new bookings, honour prepaid sessions at the price paid, update every channel at once, and do not apologise for it.
Is discounting always bad?
No — deliberate, occasional and sized so you can still deliver is normal. Habitual discounting is the problem: it teaches clients that the sale price is the real price, permanently lowers margin, and is hard to reverse. Reach for off-peak pricing or added value first.
Next in this series
Sources
- Office de la protection du consommateur. Checked 30 August 2026.
- Office québécois de la langue française, Francisation des entreprises. Checked 30 August 2026.
- Revenu Québec, Businesses. Checked 30 August 2026.
General information for people planning or running a clinic in Canada — not legal, tax or accounting advice. Consumer-protection rules on displayed prices, language obligations for customer-facing material, and the tax treatment of what you quote all depend on your circumstances and change; confirm them with the authority concerned and with your own advisors. This page publishes no prices, costs or margin figures, and nothing here is a representation of the financial performance of any New Age Spa location or franchise. It is not an offer to sell a franchise; where the law requires one, an offer is made only by disclosure document.
