Money coming in

Sliding Scale Builder

Pricing a service by what people can afford, built from real federal poverty figures and your program's true cost rather than from instinct.

2 min readOpen it in the app →Included from Core

On this page

What it produces
Where the tiers come from
Working through the builder

What it produces

A set of priced tiers, an intake application to place people into them, a staff scoring rubric, and the break-even arithmetic that says whether the whole thing works. It is a pricing model, not a discount policy.

The Sliding Scale Builder wizard showing its numbered steps and the current step's fields — The Sliding Scale Builder, which works through cost before it works through price.

Where the tiers come from

Tiers are generated from federal poverty level thresholds relative to household size, and each tier is priced as a percentage of your full price. Nothing is invented: the 2026 figures the builder uses are a base of $15,650 for a single-person household, plus $5,520 for each additional person.

So a household of four sits at a threshold of $32,210, and a tier set at 200% of poverty level covers households up to $64,420. Somebody at that level pays whatever percentage of full price you assigned to that tier.

Working through the builder

Describe the program and who it serves.
Enter every cost, with how often it occurs.
Monthly and annual costs are annualized for you. Per-program and per-participant costs are treated as one-time, as in the original model.
Set your full price and how many tiers you want.
Enter what you expect from other revenue against this program.
Grants and donations that subsidize the scale belong here, because break-even depends on them.
Read the review, then generate the intake form and the staff rubric.
The rubric includes the automatic qualifiers, the score ranges for each tier, and a hardship override protocol, which is what stops staff improvising under pressure.