How to price a bike service menu

Most workshop price lists are built by looking at the shop down the road and shaving ten percent. That prices your work off someone else's rent and mechanics. This guide builds the menu from your own numbers. It sits under running a bike repair workshop, which covers how the bookings come in.

Start from your real hourly rate

1. 1Take a normal month: wages for anyone who turns a spanner, plus rent, power, insurance, tools and software.
2. 2Divide by the hours those mechanics spend on bikes, not rostered hours. The counter, the phone, the parts hunt and the bike wash all come off.
3. 3Sixty to seventy percent of rostered hours is realistic. If you've never measured it, assume the lower end.
4. 4That's your cost per productive hour. Every price on the menu has to clear it.

Three tiers, not seven

Customers can't tell five levels of service apart and default to the cheapest thing on any list longer than they can hold in their head. Three tiers gives them a clear middle:

• A safety check or minor service. Brakes, gears, tyres, bolts, a quick true. An hour or under. Gets people through the door.
• A standard service. The minor service plus a drivetrain clean, cables checked and adjusted, bearings inspected. What most bikes need.
• A full service or overhaul. Strip, clean, regrease, replace consumables, rebuild. Half a day or more.

Everything else is an add-on, not a fourth tier. The middle tier does the selling and the add-ons do the margin.

Where "from" pricing belongs, and where it doesn't

• Use "from" where you can't know the scope until the bike is on the stand: overhauls, creak hunts, crash checks, any headset or bottom bracket you haven't seen
• Don't use it for a flat fix or a brake bleed. A "from" on predictable work reads as room to sting you
• Pair every "from" with a quote step, so the real number arrives in writing before the work starts. See quoting a repair and getting it approved

Price the add-ons to be said yes to

1. 1List the extras you already fit constantly: brake pads, chain, cassette, cables and outers, bar tape, tubes, sealant top-up, drivetrain deep clean.
2. 2Price each as a single number that includes the labour to fit it during a service. A separate labour line costs you the sale.
3. 3Keep the add-on under about a third of the service it attaches to. Past that it becomes a second decision.
4. 4Put them in the booking flow as optional extras, so the customer opts in while already committing.
5. 5Review which ones nobody picks. Priced wrong or named wrong; renaming is cheaper to try first.

Decide what speed costs

Turnaround is a product most shops give away. Someone who needs the bike tomorrow is asking you to reorder the bench around them. Put a number on it and let the customer choose it up front. Velobook's rush option defaults to a 25% loading on the service and add-ons, set per shop, down to zero. The customer opts in, so it reads as a service, not a penalty.

Put prices up once a year, on purpose

• Shops that never raise prices end up raising them 20% in a panic
• A small annual rise at the start of your quiet season mostly goes through without comment
• Move the headline services one year and the add-ons the next, so the whole list never moves at once
• Hide seasonal services rather than deleting them. Old bookings keep their labels and prices, and the service comes back in spring

Pitfalls to avoid

• Pricing from the shop down the road. A sanity check at the end, never the starting point.
• Forgetting parts margin in the service price. Consumables at cost is a service you're subsidising.
• A menu longer than a phone screen. Three to twelve services is the working range.
• "From" pricing with no quote step. That's a surprise at pickup.
• Never measuring productive hours. Without the cost per bench hour, every price is a guess.