Putting your Politics into Practice: A Sliding Scale Pricing Case Study

Practicing your politics is challenging: it demands that you explored your values and commitments, connected the dots between those principles and appropriate actions, and then charted a course for diligent implementation, all while contending with the million other demands on your time and energy that exist in your day-to-day life, and the potential conflicts that arise with others who don't share your normative stances or approaches.

It's a lot to tackle, and there are so many dimensions in which you could be putting your money where your mouth is, so to speak. It's a trap many fall into—switching out their plastic bags for reusable ones, or opting for paper straws and glass bottles, or cancelling their Amazon Prime subscription and moving their music off Spotify. Taking little steps toward alignment and hoping it all adds up to something someday.

But there's a problem. More than one, really. Small gestures like these might be concrete, and might even feel satisfying or offer immediate relief. You might be able to sleep better at night knowing Jeff Bezos doesn't get one more dime from you (bless). That concreteness has a limit, though. Jeff Bezos won't disintegrate (boo) at the loss of a few customers, or even a few thousand, and our capitalist system will keep right on chugging. You might be able to tell yourself you are no longer personally responsible for the plight of the sea turtles because you opted for paper straws, but our planet will continue to be ravaged by climate change that impacts all life forms just the same. Often, these small actions give us the illusion of having divested from the problem enough that our responsibility ends there.

Went vegan? Great! You are no longer personally responsible for any animal suffering. But obviously in our collective reality, that suffering will continue to exist, so at what point will it no longer feel comfortable to merely distance yourself from it? At some point, for some people, the echoes of their value commitments will ring too loud to be drowned out by the self-satisfaction of shifting a few personal choices left or right. If you were a runner, actions like these (going vegan, quitting Amazon) are the equivalent of putting on and lacing up your shoes. The intention is there, the groundwork is laid. But what else is there? How do you start to run? And how do you keep running, even when you hit mile 22 of the marathon?

Practicing your politics is active, not passive

Consistent practice of your politics is not an overnight transformation or an easy task, and it may never be a complete one in your lifetime, only an aspiration. But the way to make it meaningful is to practice it sincerely and at scale. Suppose (hypothetically) that my problem with Amazon is that Jeff Bezos is wholly undeserving of his unearned and obscene fortune; that its shipping methods have bankrupted independent bookstores and shaped publishing for ill; that its data centers are wasting precious water and energy resources; and that it exploits workers with impunity. All of those objections add up to some serious critiques of our entire capitalist hellscape, but they also provide several concrete avenues for action.

If I value workers' rights, what can I do in that arena, besides just quitting my Prime subscription? If I believe that water is a valuable resource that we should conserve, what can I do to meaningfully work towards its preservation? These are much harder questions, and the answer cannot just be "quit Amazon."

Practicing against the tide: sliding scale case study

Not everyone is a small business owner or making the choice for how to price services or products, but the rest of this essay takes a deep dive into sliding scale pricing to start to pull back the curtain on how to apply your political values in real life. I'll offer analogies throughout to help you think through how this case study could apply to your own political quandaries, but it'll also serve as an explanation for sliding scale pricing itself, since I know that's an area of confusion for many.

In short, though, what I'm offering here is a framework where your values lead your actions. They're the premise from which you begin making choices, that define the options on the table to begin with. Empirics and analysis can guide your course of action, certainly, and may determine what form it takes. But you can't decide the "best" way to do something if you don't know what you're even trying to do. Combining normative commitments with empirical evidence is particularly powerful for not just making good on our politics out in the world, but also for refining our approach. At each step, you'll have to check in with your assumptions, confront them with evidence, and choose again how you want to act or show up. We may not get it right on the first try, but iterating can help us act increasingly in alignment with our goals and values.

I'll certainly tackle the entire notion of prefigurative politics and acting "as if" at length some other time, but for now suffice it to say, figuring out how you want to act on the basis of your politics requires not just taking inventory of the world as it exists, but also the worlds that could exist based on how you choose to act. You'll open some opportunities and foreclose on others based on how you behave in the here and now, so it pays to choose wisely.

A personal aside: why we're talking about sliding scale pricing

In brief, I'm tackling this topic first through the lens of sliding scale pricing because it's perhaps the most uplifted strategy of anti-capitalist business practice that many will be familiar with or perhaps have encountered before. It's vaguely crunchy but becoming more common-place. It can move toward re-visioning our relationships in a gift economy, or can be practiced more incrementally.

Personally, I have been on both the receiving and the offering end of sliding scale pricing options, and felt how both feel: vulnerable, confusing, elaborate, unfamiliar. But each time I return to why I operate with sliding scale options, and how to implement them effectively and equitably, they raise new questions that get right to the heart of several of my political commitments:

• Who should have access to me and what I offer? What would it mean if some people had access and others didn't?
• What is a "fair" or reasonable price for time and energy? What are those being exchanged for?
• What's at stake in offering pricing flexibility? What if this pricing schema means services can be offered now but aren't financially viable in the long-term?
• What debates or assumptions or patterns does this pricing setup intervene in? How will people feel and behave as a result? What might shift if I implement it versus if I don't?

All of these (and countless others) demonstrate that something as seemingly simple as answering "what should this cost" actually brings to bear many more questions about how we relate to each other in society, in commerce and the economy, and in the political world writ large. And how sliding scale pricing is implemented can be just one example of walking through a framework that begins with values and ends in concrete, meaningful action.

What is sliding scale pricing?

Sliding scale pricing is a mechanism for creating economic accessibility for goods and services. Full sliding scale allows a potential client or customer to choose the price they will pay according to their means. Other variants of "sliding scale" type pricing exist, including:

• Tiered pricing, with levels corresponding to different economic resources or socioeconomic "class"
• Differential discounting, e.g., offering a fixed discount rate for people from a certain class, identity, or background
• "Karma pricing," which often means a fixed number of low- or no-cost spaces are reserved for individuals in need, sometimes subsidized by higher-paying customers
• Payment by donation/suggested donation
• NOTAFLOF ("no one turned away for lack of funds"), which can apply when prices are otherwise fixed or alongside other sliding scale models, to allow individuals to access the good or service even if they lack the ability to pay.

Some businesses and services can mix-and-match across these options. My offerings, for example, employ both tiered pricing and full sliding scale/NOTAFLOF, depending on the offering. For the sake of brevity, I'll refer to all of these various options as "sliding scale" pricing throughout, but the upshot is that there are a multitude of ways to implement variable pricing—the question is, when should you do it and how?

Why should you use sliding scale pricing?

The most common normative reason for using sliding scale pricing is a desire to create more accessibility for a good or service to people throughout the income spectrum. In some ways, this sounds a bit like an economist's dream: personalized pricing would allow sellers to target each consumer's willingness to pay directly.

On the contrary, though, standard economics would assume that each consumer would prefer to pay less for a good or service, and that upon observing another consumer paying less, each would prefer to also pay less, etc., such that we will instead set a single price and attempt to find the equilibrium price that maximizes our profits from production. We'll come back to this later, but if your head is swimming with forgotten graphs and production curves, don't worry, we're not diving deep into math here 😅

What sliding scale pricing attempts to solve, then, isn't the personalization of pricing or the empirical concern about what the "right" price is for a good/service that the market will support. Instead, it's an acknowledgment that all kinds of people with all kinds of means might benefit from access to certain spaces, services, or offerings, and that our communities likely benefit from having more of us participate and get the things we need.

Particularly for services rather than physical goods, more costs are variable rather than fixed, meaning it's more possible to offer services at differing price points. If your normative commitment is to creating access to your services, then, sliding scale pricing is one vehicle for making that happen. It's not designed as a tool for profit maximization, and in that regard exists explicitly outside the standard model of economics that we've been taught is necessary for commerce.

If it's true that sliding scale pricing isn't something that markets were designed to do, then... how does it work? Doesn't everyone who offers sliding scale pricing just lose money and go out of business?

FAQs about sliding scale pricing (and what they reveal about your unconscious assumptions)

I want to address some of the most frequently asked questions about sliding scale pricing that I get, not only to answer the actual questions (although I will), but also to uncover some of their underlying assumptions, and talk through how acting against those assumptions actually starts to bring different politics into being.

I'm not going to talk here about how to set your prices or tiers—there are lots of guides elsewhere for that—but I am going to address questions that I personally get about doing this in my own work, and the more critical questions of how to go about aligning a sliding scale strategy with a particular ethic.

Won't some people abuse sliding scale pricing to pay less?

This is by far the most common question or concern people lob when sliding scale is raised. The worry seems to be that if we can observe available lower prices for the same offering, won't everyone simply opt to pay the lowest possible price? Or pay nothing at all?

Speaking from my own experience, I don't know anyone's personal finances, so perhaps it's true that some people pay less than they could have. Overwhelmingly, though, my experience in the past 4 years of offering sliding scale options has been that most people pay the "standard" price, and very few ask or opt for accommodations. For the staunch economists in the room, it's not actually clear whether this eats into overall "profits" much at all, because it's impossible to tell how many of those who, for example, attended my handstand or acro classes these last several years and needed some pricing accommodation, would simply not have attended at all if the prices were fixed.

In stark contrast to the expectation that no one will pay anything, I've encountered many more who are hesitant (even embarrassed) to use the sliding scale. Or, if they need to deviate from whatever they perceive to be "full price," they feel an urge to ask for permission or to give a personal accounting of why they should pay less. Which leads to the second most frequently asked question...

Shouldn't people have to prove they really need a lower price/more accessible option?

This question only arises because of the (empirically false) premise of the first: no one will want to pay anything when presented with lower price options, so we should really make sure that the people who are opting to pay less "deserve" or "need" that, in order to deter people from overusing or abusing it. So on a purely empirical level, if this concern doesn't have a basis in reality, then there's no need to implement a check.

But that's not actually the point. The desire to make people "prove" their destitution has roots elsewhere. We know from policy work that means testing primarily serves to deter the most in-need from jumping over the hurdles put in place in order to get help (and changes behavior in ways that actively discourage improving economic conditions), but doesn't actually do much to deter those who are slightly better off and/or can act strategically to game the system. So again, on an empirical basis you could argue that you shouldn't implement this sort of check because it's unlikely to work the way you want anyway.

But that still isn't the point. The point is that, in my opinion and in my politics, people shouldn't have to "prove" their hardship—no writing an essay, no performing anguish, nothing—in order to receive care.

I do all my pricing on the honor system precisely because I know that means testing is a waste of time that negatively impacts the most marginal, and also because I am not (nor do I desire to be) in a position to adjudicate who is "worthy" of accommodations. It would be antithetical to my goal to set up this kind of assessment, not to mention the underlying punitive ethic against people who might deny their conditions to get a "cheaper deal."

That's just not the project I'm working on—I do work to help people grow in their physical strength, and in their political knowledge and action. So setting up barriers to people to access that in accordance with their economic conditions is really the opposite of the work I'm hoping to do. And even for the hypothetical individuals who are taking advantage of a pricing scheme they don't really "need"—there is still a need there, ultimately, for more education about economic circumstances and how this pricing scale works, but also about the lies of scarcity and manipulation that propagate themselves through capitalist systems and logic. Which gets into the next most common question...

Sliding scale is just confusing. Doesn't this require too much work and educating?

The assumption undergirding this question does have a basis in fact: many people don't really have an accurate picture of their own finances, and there's so much fear of scarcity that people need a lot of education before they can participate in a system like tiered or sliding scale pricing.

And it's true—it does require more conversations for me to using sliding scale and tiered pricing in my work than if I simply had one price and no wiggle room. But because I explicitly do political work, it's important to me to do this education, too. Besides, it's a good litmus test for whether someone really does want to do that kind of political work with me: if they can't get through the first step of rethinking their position in capitalism, we probably aren't a good fit for deeper political work together. I might offer, too, that if you are wanting to do sliding scale pricing for reasons of economic accessibility, but you aren't willing to do some educational work to help people unlearn capitalist expectations...perhaps the principles underlying your offer aren't as solidly politicized as you think.

So in that sense, opting for sliding scale (despite the work it entails to have tough conversations and do some political and economic education) was a natural consequence of the values that informed my action to begin with. It's not just the what (having accessible pricing levels) but also the how (offering sliding scale and conversations to help people locate themselves in that scale) that makes this choice one of implementing my politics in real life.

But that "how" is a more open-ended and nuanced question. As we saw up top, there are a multitude of ways to implement flexible or variable pricing with an eye toward accessibility. In particular, I sometimes get pushback about how I implement sliding scale and tiered pricing across the board, for everyone, which leads to the next common question...

Shouldn't there be special pricing only for more marginalized people?

Perhaps you've seen pricing tiers exclusively for BIPOC or queer and trans folks, and wondered why this strategy is preferable to others. This question is drawing attention to the very real, empirical basis for intersecting marginalizations: in the US, Black folks and queer and trans folks are significantly more likely as a population to experience poverty, or to lack access to financial resources and wealth. So if that's true, then why aren't all sliding scale schemes targeted at racial, gender, or sexual categories?

Speaking personally, I make all of my tiers available regardless of identity or lived experiences, and don't offer particular discounts for BIPOC, queer, trans or other people. And there's a few reasons why:

We absolutely do live in a system of racialized capitalism, and that there are a lot of intersections between economic marginalization, racial marginalization, and gender and sexuality based marginalizations. AND/BUT: the conditions I'm trying to create with tiered and sliding scale pricing are ones of economic accessibility, so to me it makes the most sense to directly address those by offering different levels of pricing, rather than to make assumptions about what types of people will have economic needs.

There's a very real tension between honoring a real intersectional risk that exists at the population level and subsuming significant individual variation in experience. When I say that I don't means test my pricing levels, that includes not requiring or expecting justifications on any basis, including race or sex. It may be that someone needs economic accessibility because of the legacy of slavery and anti-Blackness, but why they need to opt for a different price is distinct from the reality of needing it. And sometimes there is dignity in being able to claim what you need without laying bare the entire history of that need.

A second reason why I opt not to offer tiers or discounts specifically to certain groups is because I think sometimes these types of pricing schemes elide the work they want to do around "representation" or "diversity" with economic accessibility. What I mean is, while those can be important initiatives unto themselves, sometimes the expectation is that offering a special pricing tier for BIPOC or trans/queer folks will do the work of ensuring inclusion or representation on its own, without much or any additional scaffolding. Economically accessible options via sliding scale pricing don't necessarily solve access issues if what's on offer isn't attuned to the needs of the people trying to access it.

This strategy of bundling economic access with initiatives for racial inclusion is reminiscent of efforts employed by elite academic institutions to boost enrollment of students of color by targeting economic support to low-income and first generation students. With soaring costs of higher education, obviously economic access is an issue—but providing grant aid or pathways to scholarship funding does not fundamentally make the university space "accessible" to those who have not been acculturated in and to its (overwhelmingly White) upper middle class norms.

For me personally, creating economic accessibility is a different (even if related) cause to creating racial equity or trans affirming spaces. Keeping these separate forces me to be more accountable, I think, to whether I am meaningfully doing political work in alignment and solidarity with marginalized people, rather than incorporating identity-based provisions in my pricing scheme alone.

The last frequently asked question gets at a similar idea, about what "work" these kinds of sliding scale or tiered pricing schemes really do, and what exactly they're giving access to.

Shouldn’t some things just cost more? They’re “nice to haves,” not needs.

Sometimes people react badly to the entire idea of offering reduced or sliding scale pricing for some of the offerings I provide, like coaching for handstands or partner acrobatics, or even some of my political mentorship or facilitation work. They'll say things like, "some things simply should cost more—they're worth more," or "charge what you're worth," or "if you charge less, you're devaluing what everyone else does and undercutting them," or "well, those activities or that kind of work are just 'wants' or 'nice to haves', they aren't a 'need.' "

There are two key implicit claims here:

1. That the amount charged reflects either the inherent worth of whomever charges it, or the "real" value for the service that should be the same for everyone.
2. That some activities and services are necessary to sustain human life and others are simply auxiliary. That anything beyond "necessary" activities is a luxury, and should be priced accordingly.

To the first, I've already said this elsewhere, but no one's worth should be pegged to dollars, charging a rate that is sustainable for you and puts you in right relationship with your community doesn't "undermine" anyone else's worth, and the "value" exchange between people shouldn't have to do with our really limited capitalistic exchange. Sliding scale pricing absolutely does do some work to undermine the logic of capitalism that traps us all, so it might feel threatening or challenge our preconceived notions of value.

Some people may not "need" (or even want) physical activity or to connect with others through acrobatics, and that's ok; they likely wouldn't have been persuaded by lower prices, nor would I want them to be. But for others, the value of structured opportunities to engage with their bodies or with others has much more value than what they can afford with money, so my ethic motivates me to meet them in that need. Ultimately, I don't feel equipped to dictate what things do and do not offer value to human life—I only feel equipped to offer what I can, and some of that includes a window into other ways of operating.

In terms of the second point: this runs directly to the heart of so much online debate right now about SNAP benefits and what people should be "allowed" to buy with government benefits. The implicit claim here is some things—food, housing, clothing—are human "needs" that should have more accessible pricing options, but that other things like physical training or activities, or non-degree educational opportunities, aren't really worthy of that kind of discounting because you can live without them, so they simply cost what they cost.

There's a great series on TikTok with Dr. Shawna breaking down this form of "dignity policing" that directly relates here.

So in short, I don't even need to bust out my master's degree in economics to tell you that this idea is some bullshit.

Fundamentally, my belief is that people deserve to live whole, fulfilled lives. And in another world, at another time, we would all have access to all of the things necessary for us to feel fulfilled without having to worry about their cost. Obviously that's not a world we live in right now, but I think this sharp division between needs and wants is a false one, and I don't support restricting access to anything on the basis that it's not one of the minimal things needed to merely subsist in a human body. (Besides, if the argument is that necessary things should cost less or be free, what if we worked on that project instead of policing how much I charge for acro lessons, hm?)

That said, I also don't exist outside this capitalist system, and (much to my chagrin) I have to pay rent, so unfortunately I can't offer everything that I do for free or on a gift or exchange system. Even though it pains me to acknowledge it, that does mean that some of the things I offer simply won't be accessible to all kinds of people. But, insofar as I can make the "how" of what I do—the way I offer my services and how I price them—reflect the politics that I have, creating tiered and sliding scale systems is one practical way to do that.

How my pricing is putting my politics into practice (and you can too)

As I've said elsewhere, I do my sliding scale pricing in two pieces:

• My partner acrobatics and handstand classes run on full sliding scale/NOTAFLOF: as long as there are enough people attending to meet our minimum enrollment, more people participating usually makes for better acro and better learning. And to my mind, physical activity and connecting with community are key to a vibrant human existence.
• My political mentorship, facilitation, and 1:1 training all run as tiered pricing: these kinds of services are much harder for people to anchor themselves around, and a total lack of clarity about the overall price point creates too much friction before even working together. Clear tiers of pricing give people anchor points, and they also communicate my own personal needs—I have a floor past which I cannot go, because unfortunately I am subject to capitalism and needing to pay my rent also.

These choices are considered and value-aligned (although perhaps I will update them in the future as my understanding changes, as these things are wont to do). But they don't resolve some very fundamental questions about what access really means.

I experience some internal conflict around setting hourly rates at a price that I personally might think twice about as a client, or that would give me pause and make me question my means. And I'm certainly aware that there are some people who might benefit from or want to work with me, whether it's in political peer mentorship or strength training, but who could simply never afford this amount. So to whom am I really giving access? What is the material impact?

The dialectic at play with the individual actions I named at the outset—going vegan, using paper straws—is one of personal choice/responsibility vs. structural impact. And at first glance one could level the same critique at this application of sliding scale pricing: just because one person or business offers that structure for their services does not make capitalism crumble. But here's where that's wrong: making changes like opting for a sliding scale pricing structure in your business does meaningfully shift what people might expect or be willing to accept in their commercial interactions. And it can exist within an ecosystem of others offering their own goods and services.

Don't misunderstand, I'm not championing a Liberal™ ideal of incremental shifts toward bite-sized liberatory moments. What I mean is this: if you start using paper straws and only shop at indie bookstores because at some point it feels bad in your body and your heart to continue mindlessly engaging in practices that you know are part of an ecosystem of oppression, great. But a transformative political practice is taking that felt sense of injustice further, toward enacting principled stances in real time and in the present moment, with the objective of materially changing or dismantling the present structure.

When we say there is "no ethical consumption under capitalism," what we mean is that it's not possible to completely divest and live outside of the structures and institutions that are oppressing us all, simply by making better consumer choices. But you can strive for making better and more aligned choices as a way to wean yourself off the unthinking participation in systems you don't agree with, and then search for more.

Where sliding scale is concerned, no, me offering a tier that is $50 cheaper does not solve capitalism or even particularly let me sleep better at night. But no individual choice I could have made does or will do that. What applying sliding scale to my business pricing does do, though, is signal noncompliance, and a deviation from exploitative or extractive expectations and toward economic justice. There is even research to suggest that combining pay-what-you-want structures with a sense of shared social responsibility increases traditional profit. I can recognize that I exist within an ecosystem of other people offering goods and services, and needing goods and services, where we are all looking for ways to shift toward something better than what we've been offered. This could be shifting toward solidarity economies, or undertaking entirely different political shifts altogether.

That is, when I'm experiencing this internal conflict around "what does this even do, anyway?" I try to return to the realization that this isn't an individual choice meant to save us all, but rather locates me in an ecosystem and in relationships to others. It's not just numbers on a menu board advertising my prices, it's a signal about the kind of relationships I want to form in the space of commerce. It's leading with principles, engaging others' questions or concerns, and attempting to find a political equilibrium for us to work together toward a mutual goal.

Some takeaways and closing questions

As I've offered (at length), sliding scale pricing is just one way that someone in my position, operating a small business, can practically apply political principles to everyday life. Of course it still comes at a cost: operating differently than predominant paradigms always increases uncertainty and can give rise to self-doubt. Sometimes there aren't great blueprints for what you're trying to do already, and you risk making mistakes or not living up to your ideals.

But engaging in this iteration, struggle, and learning is part of the practice of the politics themselves. It's not a one-and-done procedure, but a constant revisiting of a type of framework:

• What are my values and principles?
• What evidence do I have to support my beliefs? What evidence exists to the contrary?
• How should one act, or how should a system behave, in accordance with these principles and evidence?
• What's possible to enact right now that aligns with these beliefs and evidence?
• How might acting in these ways create space and possibility for future action? What possibilities might it foreclose on?
• Do the outcomes I've witnessed from my actions align with my principles? What new evidence do they provide for how I should act? What material shifts do I witness (or not) and why?

Shifts at the systemic level require collective action, not individual shifts. But without individual commitment to rethinking how the status quo operates and choosing an alternate path, collective action also isn't possible. And sliding scale pricing is exactly a case of this—businesses and individuals aligned with principles of economic justice won't upend the entirety of capitalism worldwide by implementing a change, but the work of rethinking and implementing a change does have impact on people and on economic relationships. It's hard work that requires individual commitment, but not work you have to do alone. And the work of designing a different way of operating is itself building a muscle that can work towards bigger change.