Sliding scale and pay-what-you-can, without losing the rent

What does a sliding scale actually do in the checkout?

You publish a floor and a ceiling on a place, and the student names an amount inside that range. The amount is checked on the money path, inside the transaction that confirms the booking, and an amount outside the range is refused with the range named back to them.

That matters more than it sounds. The client never gets to state a price bindro has not published — every value is re-read under a row lock at confirmation — so a sliding scale cannot be gamed by editing a form, and you can offer a real concession without anyone having to ask you for one in person.

A pay-what-you-can class is the same mechanism with a floor of zero. There is no separate feature and no separate setting to forget.

How do I set the range so it does not lose me money?

Set the ceiling at what the class is worth to someone comfortable, the floor at what it is worth to someone who would otherwise not come, and a suggested amount nearer the top than the middle. Most people choose the suggestion; the range is for the people at either end of it.

Do the arithmetic on the floor before you publish it. If half the room pays the bottom of the range, does the class still cover the hall? If the answer is no, the floor is wrong — a sliding scale that quietly costs you the room is a subsidy you cannot sustain, and stopping it later is worse than never starting.

• Ceiling: the honest full price of the class.
• Suggested: at or just below the ceiling — this is what most people pay.
• Floor: low enough to remove a real barrier, high enough that a full room still pays.
• A free place for someone who needs one: use a comp rather than a zero floor.

What should I write next to the range?

One sentence about who the lower end is for, with no application process and no justification asked. "Pay what you can from this range — the lower end is there for students on a low income, and nobody is asked why" does more work than a paragraph.

Do not itemise your costs to guilt people upward. The teachers who report the best results from sliding scale name the purpose plainly and then say nothing further about it in the room.

Say what the scale is not, too: it is a price choice, not a negotiation at the door. The choice happens at checkout, and the register shows names rather than amounts, so nobody in the room knows what anyone else paid — including you, while you teach.

When is a comp place better than a low floor?

When you want to give someone a specific free place rather than open the floor to everyone. A comp consumes a place and checks in normally but writes no revenue, so your attendance stays honest and your income stays honest at the same time.

That separation is the reason to prefer it to a zero-price sale: at the end of the month you can see that the class had twelve people in it and ten of them paid, without either number being a guess.

Can I combine a sliding scale with class packs?

You can run both, but not on the same purchase. A pack credit is worth a fixed amount — the pack price divided by its credits — and it buys one place; if a class is worth more than the credit, the student spends the credit and pays the difference. A chosen sliding amount and a pack credit are two different ways of naming what a place costs.

The simplest arrangement most teachers land on: sliding scale on drop-ins, a flat price on packs. The pack is already the discount, and layering a second one makes the maths harder to explain than the saving is worth.