Nobody publishes prices, which is deliberate, so here are the ranges as they actually run.
The formats and what they cost
One-on-one, hourly. $200 to $800 an hour is the common band. Under $200 you are usually getting someone early in their practice, which is not automatically bad. Above $800 you are into executive coaching for people with real scope, and the number can go a lot higher.
One-on-one, retainer. $1,000 to $5,000 a month, typically two to four sessions plus some access in between. The access is often the part that matters and the part people forget to use.
Group or mastermind. $200 to $1,000 a month. Cheaper, and you get peers with the same problems, which is a real benefit that one-on-one does not give you.
Program or cohort. A few thousand up front for a fixed number of weeks. Good for a specific transition, weak for ongoing accountability once it ends.
Rates swing hard by market and specialty. Treat all of this as a range to negotiate against.
What actually moves the number
Specialty raises it more than general experience. A coach who has run your exact business at your exact stage is worth a premium, and a generalist with an impressive bio often is not.
Scope raises it. Coaching a CEO on a company sale is not coaching a founder on time management.
Format raises it. Group is cheaper for a reason. So is asynchronous.
Geography still matters, though less every year.
The question to ask before you spend anything
Is your bottleneck knowing, or doing?
If you genuinely do not know what to do next, buy the expertise. An outside view from someone who has done it is worth several thousand dollars and often much more.
If you know exactly what to do and it is not getting done, you do not have a knowledge problem. You have an execution problem, and $500 an hour is a very expensive way to be reminded of things you already wrote down.
Most people who hire a coach are in the second group and buy as though they were in the first.
How to tell if it is working
Pick the metric before you start. Not "clarity" or "confidence," which are unfalsifiable and which is why they get used. Revenue, close rate, hours worked, time to hire, whatever the actual problem is.
Then check at ninety days. If nothing moved and you cannot name a specific decision you made differently, stop. Good coaches will tell you the same thing.
The option nobody selling coaching mentions
A large share of what coaching does between sessions is mechanical: keeping the goals written down, keeping the metrics current, noticing when follow-through has stopped, and asking about it. That work does not need a human and does not need $500 an hour.
That is what we built [Goal Boss](/) to do. It runs on the method from ten years of coaching work and the book, it meters by credits instead of hours, and it starts free with $100 in credits, which is about ten minutes of a human coach.
It is not a substitute for the hard conversation. It is a substitute for paying hard-conversation prices for weekly admin. If you want the direct comparison, we wrote [AI business coach vs a human coach](/insights/ai-business-coach-vs-human-coach).
