Pricing is one of the hardest decisions in any service business. Raise prices too aggressively and you worry about losing clients. Keep them too low and you are working harder for less.
Most pet business owners set their prices once, maybe adjust them annually, and otherwise try not to think about it. The process is manual, time-consuming, and stressful. Update each service one at a time, hope you did not miss anything, and then deal with the awkward conversation when a regular notices.
The Pricing Assistant changes that.
What the Pricing Assistant does
The Pricing Assistant lives under Services in your Petboost dashboard. It gives you four ways to adjust service prices across your business in one go.
1. Fixed Amount
Add or subtract a fixed dollar amount across selected services. Want to add $5 to every grooming service? Select the services, set the amount, preview the changes, and apply.
You can filter by service category and type (initial, regular, add-on, lesson, stay) so you only adjust the services you intend to.
2. Percentage
Increase or decrease prices by a percentage. A 10% increase across all regular services, for example. The assistant includes rounding options (round to the nearest $0.50, $1, $5, or $10, rounding up, down, or to the nearest) so your prices stay clean.
3. Build-In Fees
This mode is designed for businesses that want their service prices to include the Petboost booking fee, so customers see one clean number.
Rather than listing a $60 grooming service and having a separate booking fee appear at checkout, you can set your prices to absorb the fee. The assistant calculates what your service price needs to be so that after the booking fee is deducted, you still receive your target amount.
4. Magic Pricing
The most powerful mode. Magic Pricing analyses your booking data from the past 90 days and generates pricing recommendations for each service based on:
- Demand: How frequently the service is booked relative to others
- Utilisation: How much of your available time is being used
- Effective hourly rate: What you actually earn per hour after accounting for service duration
- Category benchmarks: How each service compares to others in its category
Three modes are available:
- Maximise: Prioritises revenue growth, suggesting increases for high-demand services
- Balanced: A moderate approach that adjusts prices based on demand without aggressive changes
- Fill diary: Prioritises occupancy, suggesting lower prices for under-booked services
Every suggestion comes with a confidence level and a rationale explaining why the recommendation was made. You can include or exclude individual services before applying.
What happens after you apply
After applying price changes, the Pricing Assistant can handle the follow-through:
- Update existing appointments: Optionally update the prices on future appointments that were booked at the old rate
- Notify customers: Send email notifications to affected customers informing them of the price change
- Recurring series: Future appointments in recurring series can be updated automatically
This eliminates the manual work of individually editing future appointments and sending separate communications.
Who this is for
The Pricing Assistant is available to all Business Pro, Business Flex, and Business Max accounts. It is accessible from the Services page in your Petboost dashboard.
It is particularly useful for:
- Annual price reviews: Adjust all prices at once instead of editing each service individually
- Fee absorption: Build your Petboost booking fee into service prices for cleaner checkout
- Data-driven pricing: Use actual booking data to identify services that are underpriced or overpriced
- New business onboarding: Set initial pricing across a large service catalogue efficiently