The Worst Place to Ask What to Charge Is the Machine That Read the Whole Internet

Updated October 20, 2026

Somebody on one of our calls this week admitted what a lot of owners are doing quietly: before setting tuition, they asked an AI what a martial arts school should charge.

I’ve tested this myself. Ask ChatGPT or Claude what to charge for martial arts lessons and you’ll get about $150 a month. You’ll get a lecture about how people don’t like contracts. And you’ll get a list of seven other things you should be nickel-and-diming your families to death with — summer camps, testing fees, retail, pro shop margin, birthday party upcharges.

That’s not a bug in the software. That’s the software working exactly as designed. These systems are trained on the internet, and the internet is where the great mediocre majority publishes its prices. You asked a very well-read machine to average the people who are struggling, and it gave you a very confident average of people who are struggling.

The Same Mistake, With Extra Steps

The AI version is just the modern edition of an old habit. Owners call around. They pull up three competitors’ websites. They decide they should sit somewhere in the middle, maybe a hair above, and they call that a pricing strategy.

It isn’t. It’s magical thinking with a spreadsheet attached. You’ve outsourced the single most important number in your business to whoever in your zip code was least sophisticated about setting theirs.

A couple of years ago at a meeting in Clearwater, Florida, Dr. Moody put every million-dollar school owner in the room up on stage and asked them one question: if there’s one thing you’re doing now that you regret not doing sooner, what is it?

Every single one of them said the same thing. They were too slow and too timid raising their prices.

One of the owners sat there working the math out on a legal pad while the rest of them talked, and when she finished she’d calculated that she had left about $2 million on the table over the previous few years. Dr. Moody ran a version of that same math live on a call this week with another member — 200 new members a year, charging $200 a month, now charging $400. Five years of delay. It comes to roughly $2.1 million in revenue that simply never showed up. And that’s a conservative number, because it doesn’t count what the renewal programs would have done on top of it.

Here’s the part that should keep you up at night: that money is 100% profit. There is no marginal cost. You don’t rent another square foot, you don’t hire another instructor, you don’t buy another mat. Dr. Moody’s exact words were, “By the way, that’s 100% profit. There’s no expense that’s tied into it.”

Two Schools, Same Retention, Same Enrollments

I keep two schools in my head as a permanent reminder.

The first has 190 students and grosses about $25,000 a month. Average revenue per student, $130 to $140.

The second has 150 students and grosses about $55,000 a month. Average revenue per student is in the high $300s. If that school ever gets to 300 students, it grosses $110,000 a month.

Their retention is roughly the same. Their enrollment flow is roughly the same. The instruction is comparable. The only meaningful difference between them is pricing. The school with fewer students takes home more than twice as much, and its owner works less to get it.

The schools I’d point you at as models — the ones you’d meet in Colorado in October — run somewhere between $300 and $450 in average monthly revenue per student, and all of them are pushing toward $500. Scott and Brandy Sullivan did $1.3 million gross last year and netted $830,000 out of 2,400 square feet on the second floor of a shopping center with a parking problem, teaching mostly kids’ Brazilian jiu-jitsu to about 340 active students. Run that division yourself.

The current numbers we hand new members are simple. Trial enrollment sits between $397 and $447 a month. Leadership renewal is double that or more. Black belt is a roughly 50% bump, and black belt is the fallback position, not the primary program.

“My Students Can’t Afford It”

This is the objection I hear most, and it is never actually a price problem. It’s a positioning problem.

If what the parent understands they’re buying is a really good front kick and a nice sidekick, then they’re right — that’s worth about $75 a month, and you’d be gouging them at $397. Nobody’s kid needs a $400-a-month sidekick.

But if what they understand they’re buying is character development, unshakable confidence, the ability to set a goal and follow through on it, immunity to negative peer pressure, honor roll grades, and eventually an adult who is confident at work and confident walking to their car at night — that is a priceless curriculum. Price objections don’t get overcome. They stop showing up.

And geography is not your excuse either. Yes, one of our top performers is in a dense, upscale tech corridor. Another is in Mankato, Minnesota. Dean Romanelli is in Detroit. Tim Harrison is in Joliet, Illinois, doing $1.2 million. There’s a school well outside Jacksonville where the median household income is $45,000. At our Thornton location you don’t see Range Rovers and Ferraris in the lot. You see Toyotas and Hyundais.

Never Explain Yourself

One more thing, because it comes up the moment you raise your rates and a new family finds out what their cousin pays.

Dr. Moody put it about as plainly as it can be put: “We never, ever, ever justify price. I don’t ever have to explain why we’re charging what we charge. That’s our problem, not theirs. Nobody wants to hear about your problems.”

You can talk about inflation. You can talk about how much you’ve added to the character development curriculum. You can do all of that if it makes you feel better. But there is no reason, ever, that you have to justify a price. What you actually have to do is present it without apologizing for it. I’ve watched program directors say “I know this is a lot, but…” and torpedo an enrollment before the parent had an opinion.

Your posture has to be that this is worth $5,000 a month and you’re only charging $397. You never say that out loud. You just have to believe it.

The good news is that you don’t need a magic ingredient. Your area’s median income doesn’t have to triple. You don’t need a hundred more students. You raise the price for the next new person who walks in the door, and that’s it. The data on this is not ambiguous — raising rates to the numbers we recommend does not reduce how many people enroll. The only variable that changes the outcome is whether you believe it when you say it.

So stop asking the internet. It read everybody, including all the people you don’t want to be.

If you want the whole system, grab the free book at FillYourSchool.com — or call or text 1-720-256-0208 and ask Bob Dunne about a free evaluation of your school.