Most med spa pricing is set by looking at a supplier invoice, adding a margin that feels defensible, and hoping nobody asks. That method produces a number. It does not produce a price, and the difference shows up two years later when the practice is busy and still not profitable.
Three Empire faculty members who each own and run a practice — Dr. Jennifer Thomas-Goering in Ann Arbor, Maritza Mejia FNP on Long Island, and Melissa Pulcini-Buttine PA in Greenwich, Connecticut — recently talked through how they actually set and change prices. What follows is their method, and the specific mistakes they each made first.
How to Set Med Spa Pricing: Start With Your Market, Not Your Costs
The first step is not arithmetic. It is research.
“Number one, for creating your treatment menu and creating your pricing structure — being in Ann Arbor is completely different from where you are,” Dr. Thomas-Goering said. “The first thing that I need to do is a competitive analysis. I need to do some secret shopping. I need to see what my competitors are charging in the area.”
Secret shopping means what it sounds like: calling, booking, and asking the questions a patient would ask, in the geography you actually serve. Published price lists are marketing documents. What a front desk quotes on the phone for a specific concern is the real number, and it is frequently different.
The purpose is not to match the lowest price you find. It is to know the range you are operating inside, because a price set without that knowledge is either leaving money on the table or quietly destroying the market you share.
Why Underpricing Hurts Every Med Spa in Your Market
This is the point all three returned to, and it is the one least often said out loud.
“If I am not meeting that standard, then what I end up doing is I’m diluting it for everyone,” Dr. Thomas-Goering said.
Melissa Pulcini-Buttine put it in terms of what it does to the wider market: “Value over discounts. The practice that is going so low with pricing affects us all. It affects everybody.”
A new injector who prices at half the local range is not winning on value. They are training a patient population to expect a number that cannot sustain a clinic — including their own, eighteen months later, when the supply costs land and the pricing cannot move.
Why Providers Undercharge: the Obstacle Is Guilt, Not Math
Every one of them described the same difficulty, and none of it was financial.
“We learn how to be providers. We are the worst ones in finance,” Maritza Mejia said. “We feel bad to charge people at the beginning. I remember that was my biggest struggle when I first started. I was coming from bedside nursing, and coming here and charging three thousand, four thousand dollars for a treatment — I was like, oh my God, that’s a lot of money.”
What changed it was a single reframe from a colleague: think as an injector, not as a provider.
The distinction is not about caring less. It is that a clinician trained in a hospital learned to think of their labour as salaried and their supplies as institutional. Neither is true in a cash-pay aesthetic practice, where the price has to carry the product, the room, the insurance, the training that made the technique possible, and the time the patient is buying.
What Your Med Spa Prices Should Actually Cover
Dr. Thomas-Goering extended the same point into what the number is actually meant to cover.
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“When you’re doing your pricing and your menu of services, we undervalue ourselves. We undervalue all of the money, the time that we’ve invested — not just the classes to learn how to do the injections, but everything that got you to be a PA, everything that got you to be an NP. All of those years.”
A price that only recovers the cost of the product and the two-day course that taught the technique is pricing the last step of a decade-long path. The judgement a patient is paying for — knowing when not to treat, recognising a complication early, choosing a different plan — came from the years before that.
How to Raise Med Spa Prices When Your Costs Go Up
This is the failure mode that catches established practices rather than new ones.
“We also aren’t changing our prices with the times,” Dr. Thomas-Goering said. “All of our supplies are going up, all of our products are going up, and we have to feel like it’s okay for us to also increase our prices.”
Melissa Pulcini-Buttine connected it back to where the problem starts: “That goes back to when you’re starting your practice. If you’re starting too low, and then all of a sudden you go with the times and how much things are costing us… I definitely struggled with that in the beginning too, not having a business class.”
A practice that opened at the bottom of its market has no room to absorb a cost increase, and raising prices from that position looks like a bigger jump to patients than the same increase would from a defensible starting point. The opening price sets the ceiling on every price that follows.
Med Spa Membership Programs Instead of Discounts
All three run membership programmes, and all three described them as the answer to the discount problem rather than a version of it.
“If you want a lower price, we still can give you a little discount — but we have membership, we have reward programs,” Maritza Mejia said of her practice. “You trust me, I trust you. If you’re just coming once in a blue moon, then you pay the full price.”
That is the structural difference. A discount lowers the price for anyone who asks. A membership lowers it for someone who has committed, and it prices the commitment rather than the treatment.
Dr. Thomas-Goering framed it as the honest version of what aesthetic medicine actually is: “What I like to say to my patients is, it took years for you to develop this — the wrinkles, the sun damage. I can’t fix it in one day. This is a relationship that we are going to have together for years.”
Melissa Pulcini-Buttine described the second-order effect, which is the one that shows up in revenue: “My members are coming not just for Botox, one and done. They’re staying with me for all the other services, and they’re inviting friends and family.”
How they structure them
- Tiers rather than a single rate. Melissa Pulcini-Buttine runs multiple levels, with a percentage off injectables, skincare and IV therapy rather than a discount on one category.
- Deliberate cross-selling between wellness and aesthetics. “It gets my aesthetic patients doing wellness things, and my wellness patients doing aesthetic things.”
- Rewards that are not price cuts — birthday benefits, referral rewards, members-only events.
- Menu exposure. Maritza Mejia’s point is that a membership introduces patients to services they did not know the practice offered.
Empire teaches this directly in Med Spa Pricing & Financial Planning and, for established practices reworking their numbers, Profitability & Pricing Strategies for Private Practice.
How to Price a Med Spa: a Practical Sequence
- Secret-shop your actual catchment. Not a national average. The practices a patient would realistically choose instead of you.
- Establish the range, and place yourself inside it deliberately. If you sit below it, know why, and know how you will move up later.
- Price the judgement, not the product. The cost of the vial is the smallest input.
- Decide your increase mechanism before you need it. An annual review is easier to explain to a patient than an emergency correction.
- Build the membership before you build the discount. Retention is cheaper than acquisition, and it is the only version of a lower price that improves the business.
The Med Spa Pricing Mistake Underneath All the Others
Every one of these three is a successful owner, and every one of them described starting at a price they now consider wrong. None of them cited a lack of business acumen. They cited not having had a business class at all — the gap the 3-Day Business Bootcamp and Blueprint for Success were built to close — learning to inject safely, and assuming the commercial side would follow.
“I really try and help our students as much as possible to not make the same mistakes that we made,” Melissa Pulcini-Buttine said.
Pricing is the decision that is hardest to reverse. It is worth making it deliberately, once, with research behind it — rather than discovering two years in that the number you picked in week one is the reason the practice is busy and still tight.
