How to Set Up Sliding-Scale Tiers

Sliding-scale pricing is one of the most powerful things a community arts organization can do. It says to your community: we want you here, and cost shouldn't be the thing that keeps you out. But for the people running the programs, tiered pricing can feel like a leap of faith. If too many students pick the lower tier, does the class lose money? If nobody picks the higher tier, was it worth offering?

The Class Price Calculator takes the guesswork out of this. It models exactly how many supported-price seats your class can absorb at every enrollment level, so you can offer accessibility with your eyes wide open. If you want to understand the philosophy behind sliding-scale pricing in more depth, our article on sliding-scale pricing covers the research and the reasoning. This guide is purely practical: here's how to set it up in the tool.

1 Enable Tiered Pricing

Before you can configure tiers, you need to toggle the feature on. In the left-hand input panel, scroll down to Section 6: Tiered Pricing. You'll see a simple toggle labeled "Enabled / Disabled." Click it to switch to Enabled.

Once enabled, three things appear immediately:

• Three tier boxes showing Supported, Standard, and Supporter prices
• Input fields for the Supported Discount % and Supporter Premium %
• A Break-even Floor indicator showing the minimum viable per-student price

The tier boxes update in real time as you change the discount and premium values. You don't need to click "Calculate" to see the tier prices. They recalculate instantly.

2 Set Your Discount and Premium

Two fields control the spread between your tiers:

• Supported Discount % is the percentage below the standard price that supported-tier students pay. The default is 15%, which means if your standard price is $200, the supported price would be $170.
• Supporter Premium % is the percentage above the standard price for supporters. The default is 20%, so that same $200 class would cost $240 at the supporter tier.

If you're just starting out with tiered pricing, 15% and 20% are solid defaults. They're generous enough to feel meaningful to the student choosing the supported tier, and modest enough that the supporter tier doesn't feel excessive. As you run more classes and collect actual tier-split data (more on that below), you can adjust based on what your community actually does.

What if the supported price drops too low?

Below the discount and premium fields, you'll see the Break-even Floor. This is the cost per student at your minimum enrollment level, the absolute lowest price at which the class covers its costs with no margin at all.

If your supported discount pushes the supported price below this floor, the tool shows a "Below floor" badge on the Supported tier box. This is a warning, not a block. The calculator still shows you the true discounted price. It simply flags that at minimum enrollment, if every seat were filled at the supported price, the class would need subsidy.

This is useful information, not a reason to panic. In practice, not every seat will be at the supported tier, which is exactly why the sustainability analysis (Step 5) is so important.

3 Set the Predicted Tier Distribution

Below the discount and premium fields, you'll find three more inputs under Predicted Distribution:

• % Supported (default: 25)
• % Standard (default: 65)
• % Supporter (default: 10)

These three numbers must add up to 100%. A validation indicator below the fields turns green when the sum is correct and red when it's off.

The defaults come from real-world research on pay-what-you-can models: Panera Cares' experience from 2010 to 2019, Magnatune's data from a study of 1,452 transactions, and ProfitWell's three-tier benchmarks. They represent a conservative starting point. Roughly a quarter of your class at a discount, about two-thirds at full price, and one in ten choosing to pay more.

These numbers drive the Predicted Tier Distribution table (Step 7 below). If you've been running tiered classes and have actual data from your Class History, the tool will eventually offer to replace these research defaults with your real numbers. Until then, the defaults are a reasonable estimate.

4 Calculate and Review Scenarios

With tiered pricing enabled, click "Calculate Scenarios" in the header bar. The calculator generates your standard enrollment scenarios table and also produces two additional tables that only appear when tiered pricing is on:

• Supported-Seat Sustainability
• Predicted Tier Distribution

Both tables appear below the main enrollment scenarios. Let's walk through each one.

5 Read the Sustainability Analysis

The Supported-Seat Sustainability table answers a specific question: at each enrollment level, how many supported-price seats can my class absorb before it stops being viable?

The table has five columns:

Column	What It Means
Enrollment	Total students in the class at this level
Max Supported (Break-even)	Most supported seats the class can absorb and still cover costs (zero margin)
% of Class	That number as a percentage of total enrollment
Max Supported (Target Margin)	Most supported seats while still hitting your target profit margin
% of Class	That number as a percentage of total enrollment

The calculation uses a conservative assumption: it assumes all remaining seats (non-supported) pay the Standard price, not the Supporter price. This gives you a floor estimate. If some students do choose the supporter tier, the real number of absorbable supported seats will be even higher.

Look at the row for your expected enrollment. If the "Max Supported (Target Margin)" column shows 2 or 3 seats in a class of 10, you know you can comfortably offer the supported tier to a meaningful number of students without sacrificing your financial targets. That's the data you need to offer accessibility with confidence.

6 Two-Tier Mode

Some registration systems only support two pricing levels. Sawyer, for example, lets you set a standard price and a single promotional code for a supported price. There's no built-in way to offer a third tier.

To use the calculator in two-tier mode, simply set the Supporter Premium to 0%. The supporter tier box disappears, and all the downstream tables and framing language adjust automatically. The sustainability analysis still works. The predicted distribution still works (just set % Supporter to 0 and split the remainder between supported and standard). The tier framing language generator will produce two-tier copy instead of three.

Two-tier mode isn't a compromise. It's the right configuration when your booking system has a two-tier constraint, and the tool supports it fully.

7 Read the Predicted Tier Distribution Table

This table models what your blended revenue would look like if students select tiers at the percentages you predicted in Step 3. It's your best estimate of real-world revenue before you've run the class.

The table has nine columns:

Column	What It Means
Enrollment	Total students at this level
Sup'd	Number of students at the supported price (rounded from your predicted %)
Std	Number at the standard price
Sup'r	Number at the supporter price
Blended Revenue	Total revenue mixing all three tier prices
Costs	Total costs at this enrollment level
Profit	Blended revenue minus costs
Margin	Profit as a percentage of blended revenue
vs All-Std	Percentage difference between blended revenue and what you'd earn if every student paid the standard price

The vs All-Std column is especially revealing. With the default 25/65/10 split, you'll typically see a small negative number, often around -2% to -4%. That's the actual cost of offering accessibility at this distribution. For most organizations, a 3% revenue reduction is a small price for the mission alignment and community goodwill that tiered pricing creates.

If the vs All-Std column shows a positive number, it means the supporter premium more than compensates for the supported discount. This can happen when you have a generous supporter premium and a small predicted supported percentage.

8 Putting It All Together

Once you've reviewed the sustainability and predicted distribution tables, you have everything you need to make a confident decision about tiered pricing. You know your tier prices. You know how many supported seats the class can absorb. You know what your blended revenue looks like. And you know the real cost, as a percentage of revenue, of offering accessibility.

Setting up tiers is the first half. The second half is communicating them well and tracking what actually happens. From here, you'll want to:

• Generate framing language for your registration page. The right words matter more than you might think. See our guide to tier framing language.
• Track your actuals after the class runs. Save the plan to your Class History, then come back to enter real enrollment and tier-split data. Over time, the tool replaces research defaults with your own numbers. See our guide to tracking actuals.