Happy, Healthy, & Wealthy Therapists | Ep 52: I Charge $1500 for My Intensives. You Shouldn’t Copy That Number.

Released: 8/19/2026

Show Notes:

Amanda makes the case that comparing your intensive rate to what everyone else charges is the easy question dressed up as the hard one. The real question, the one most therapists skip right past, is what are you actually trying to buy back with that money? Time, peace, the ability to say no without panic, evenings that belong to you instead of your notes? That answer looks different for every therapist, and none of it gets solved by copying someone else’s rate. She gets concrete about how to actually figure out your number, why therapy intensives change the math in a way that weekly sessions alone can’t, and why the structure of your practice has to serve your actual life rather than the other way around.

3 Key Takeaways:

1. Comparing your intensive rate to what strangers charge in a Facebook thread is the easy question dressed up as the hard one, and the actual question underneath it is what are you trying to buy back with that money.
2. Your rate is not a target to hit based on someone else’s practice; it is a tool that should be sized around your specific overhead, your specific life, and the specific thing you are trying to reclaim, whether that is time, peace, or the ability to say no without panic.
3. Intensives shift the math of a therapy practice not just because of the dollar amount but because fewer, heavier sessions mean fewer moving pieces to manage, less mental reorientation between clients, and more of the bandwidth that actually makes the work sustainable.

Connect with Amanda:

• Follow on Instagram: @amandakbcoaching
• Check out the Amanda KB

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Transcript:

Amanda Buduris (00:00)
Hey, welcome back to the show. I’m Amanda, a trauma therapist and private practice coach. I run a virtual practice using lots of different modalities, such as brain spotting and EMDR. I talked all about in the last episode how it is not my modalities that sell me in my intensives, though. So go listen to that if you have not already. But I also spent a lot of time teaching therapists how to build a practice around intensives instead of the endless 50-minute grind.

And if you have been listening to this podcast for a while, you’ve probably heard me mention my rate before. I charge $1,500 for a three-hour intensive. And I know there are a lot of therapists that I’ve worked with, some of you, you may have even heard me talk about that. I think I used to use it as the name of my one of my webinars that’s recorded, like how to charge $1,500 for a three-hour intensive. But

I need to change a lot of the marketing. And this is what I’m deep diving into on today’s podcast episode because the whole point is not for you to charge what I charge. This $1,500 number, this is not specifically what you’re supposed to be working towards. So I don’t expect you to do that. And I’m gonna break down what I do and why I do what I do. So $1,500 for a three-hour intensive is my number, but it’s not your number. And it was never supposed to be.

But I hear from therapists all the time who keep looking at all these spreadsheets and fee calculators, they’re looking at other people’s rates, trying to kind of reverse engineer what I should charge based on what someone else is charging. And I get why we’ve kind of been given that advice for those of us who are new when we’re starting our private practice and we’re like, I don’t know what the heck to charge for these services. Numbers are super easy to compare, right? Like they are clean, they fit in a text thread.

What do you charge for an intensive? What’s your hourly rate? What’s your caseload look like? But comparing numbers is the easy question dressed up as the hard one. So today I want to get to the actual hard question, the one underneath all of that comparison. So let’s get into it. The pattern I see on lots of calls that I have with therapists, especially inside my Therapy Intensive Academy, and probably a ton of the Facebook group.

threads that I’ve seen back when I was in Facebook groups. I really hate them. I find that to be one of the most toxic places on the internet, so I don’t do it a lot. But a lot of people will ask questions around like, hey, what are you all charging for a half day intensive? And like 40 comments can roll in with people saying, $900, $1,200, $1,800, $2,500. People start comparing their number to the numbers in the thread. And depending on where they land, they either feel a little smug, like, ooh, look at me, I’m doing actually pretty good.

Or they feel really anxious, like, fuck, I must be doing something wrong. That comparison then can start to feel a little bit productive, right? It starts to feel like research. But watch what it actually does to you. If your rate is lower than the thread and you start to wonder if you’re undervaluing yourself and you just raise your rate without really knowing why, you’re like, I don’t know, other people charge that, so maybe I can too.

Then, you know, that’s when we start to get a little bit too into our head and a lot into our anxious part of our brain when we just raise a number because some other stranger on the internet changes more. Right. Like if your rate is higher, maybe you get a little defensive, you get a little like, well, let me justify this, and you start building your pricing page around proving you deserve the number instead of around what your client actually gets.

Either way, the number starts to become the whole conversation, right? It’s your rate, my rate, her caseload, his income goal. It’s all just numbers stacked against other numbers. And again, totally understand the poll. Numbers are concrete. They don’t require you to sit with anything uncomfortable. The I charge fifteen hundred dollars for my therapy intensives, and again, that’s my starting package. That is a fact you can say out loud in a group, right? Okay, this is what I’m doing, but

Communicating why you’re doing what you’re doing, why you’re charging what you’re charging, that is much harder to say concretely and concisely, right? But typically it’s something like this. I’m trying to build a life where I don’t feel trapped by my own calendar. Right. That is 99% of the therapists that I’ve talked to. 1% of them, I mean, everyone cares about providing their clients with better quality clinical care.

But a lot of us feel trapped in our own calendar. And that’s where these therapy intensives look like a really good option of what to incorporate into our schedule. So we again we default to the easy question: what’s your rate? What’s your caseload? What’s your income goal for the year? We treat practice building like it’s kind of a math problem when a huge amount of it is actually an identity problem that is wearing this spreadsheet as a little bit of a disguise. And

What I want you to notice about that comparison trap specifically is that it’s keeping you focused on someone else’s practice instead of your own life. So many people are like, well, Amanda, I was looking at your website and I kind of stole this framework from your website. And I’m just like, you just you’re welcome to do that for research purposes. Obviously, please do not copy paste anything verbatim from my website to yours. That is copyright infringement. But

It’s keeping you focused in the wrong place. You can spend years chasing a number that even if you hit it, doesn’t actually change the thing that was bothering you in the first place. I have talked to therapists who doubled their income and still felt a little bit resentful, still felt just as tired, if not more, and maybe even still felt trapped by their calendar. Because this number can go up, but if nothing is shifting in how you actually live your life, then what is the point?

Right. So that is the trap. The number moves, but the problem doesn’t. So if the number isn’t the real question, you might be asking, what is? The question I think we are all avoiding because it’s a lot harder to sit with than what should I charge? Is what are you actually trying to buy back with that money? Right. Really think about that for a second. Think about that for more than a second if you haven’t before.

Because it’s not rhetorical. I mean it literally. When you picture charging more, when you picture hitting whatever income number you’ve got circled, is on your manifestation board, is on your Google spreadsheet. When you picture that, what is that number supposed to purchase for you? Because it is rarely just the money. The money is just a stand-in for something else. So is it time?

Do you want three fewer client hours a week so that you can actually make dinner before seven? Is it peace? Do you want to stop doing the mental math every single Sunday night about how many sessions you need this month to cover your rent or buy groceries? Is it the ability to say no? Do you want to be able to turn away a client who isn’t the right fit or who’s triggering something in you that you know isn’t sustainable without that wave of panic about whether you can afford to lose that income?

That question does not have the same answer for every therapist listening to this episode. And it shouldn’t. Some of you are trying to build an exit ramp off of insurance panels because you’re exhausted by the reimbursement rates and the utilization reviews and the sense that a case manager somewhere is making clinical decisions about your client that you disagree with. Some of you don’t even want to leave insurance. You just want one Tuesday off a month.

without three backup plans in place in case a client cancels and you feel like you have to fill that slot immediately. Some of you are trying to buy back your evenings so you can be present with your own kids instead of finishing notes at 9 p.m. Some of you are trying to buy back your own nervous system because you’ve been in survival mode financially for so long that you don’t even actually know what it would feel like to build a practice from a place of calm instead of scarcity. None of those are the same answer.

And none of them get solved just by copying my rate. So here is really the thing about that $1,500 number. That number works for me because of what it lets me buy back, given my specific life, my specific overhead, my specific goals. It might be wildly wrong for you. Maybe your version of buying back peace requires a higher number because you’re the sole income in your household.

Maybe it requires a lower number because you’re building slowly and you’d rather fill your calendar with confidence at $900 for an intensive than sit half empty at $1,800 while you’re kind of finding your footing. The specific number is not the goal. The number is just the tool. The goal is the actual life underneath it, the actual thing you’re trying to protect or reclaim and finally have enough of.

And if you skip past that question and go straight to picking a rate because it’s what someone else charges, you end up with a practice that hits a number on paper, but still doesn’t feel like anything changed. You are busier, maybe you’re richer, you have a little bit more money and cash flow, but you still feel just as stuck. So before we talk about any tactics today, I want you to actually answer it for yourself. Not what should I charge, but what am I trying to buy?

Once you know what you are actually trying to buy back, the next problem shows up, right? So the move that gets you there will not look the same for every practice. And it’s tempting to skip this part two and just copy whatever worked for somebody else. For a lot of the therapists I work with inside the Therapy Intensives Academy, intensives end up being that move. But I want to be really, really specific about why, because I don’t think it’s mainly about the dollar amount. It’s about what shifts.

once fewer sessions carry more weight. So when you’re doing a ton of 50-minute weekly sessions, your income is built out around a huge number of small transactions. Every week, every client, every 50-minute block has to happen, has to get scheduled, has to survive a cancellation or a client moving or a client just deciding therapy isn’t for them right now. Your stability is spread across dozens of moving pieces.

And any of them going sideways barely dents you, but keeping all of them running is exhausting. So an intensive starts to change this math because if you replace 10 50 minute sessions with two well-priced three-hour intensives, you’ve dramatically reduced the number of moving pieces you’re managing while covering the same or more income.

So there are fewer sessions on your calendar, there are fewer intake calls, there are fewer weekly transitions where you’re mentally reorienting to a new client every 50 minutes. And that is a really good, you know, both pricing strategy as well as a way to buy back hours of your week and ounces of your mental bandwidth, which we know is so, so precious as a private practice therapist. And to slow this down even more, because I talk really fast and I don’t want you to hear.

Therapy intensives and think that that’s automatically your answer just because it’s mine. But if what you’re actually trying to build and buy back is predictability, a steady known income every single week, intensives actually can initially feel less predictable while you’re building that muscle because you are filling fewer, bigger slots instead of many small slots.

If what you’re trying to buy back is time with your own kids in the after school hours, you need to build an intensive model that doesn’t require you to work nights and weekends to accommodate other people’s schedules, which is its own decision you have to make on purpose, not out of guilt, not by accident. And this is exactly the part that gets skipped when everyone’s comparing numbers in a Facebook thread. Nobody is asking, well, what do you actually want your Tuesday to look like? They’re asking, what do you charge?

And the second question, again, is so much easier to answer when we let it stand in for the first one. This real work around rate setting is not about just finding the magic rate. It is figuring out which structure, which format, which pricing actually produces a specific outcome you just thought to yourself a few minutes ago. For some of you, that’s intensives. For some of you, it’s a weekly caseload that is smaller at a higher rate.

For some of you, it’s a hybrid. It’s a few intensives a month laid on top of a lighter weekly practice. The structure serves the goal, right? That is the whole point of this, not to have a goal and then try to be like, I don’t know how to make this happen, but here’s my goal and here’s my structure. So to get really, really concrete, because I think this is where a lot of us stay stuck in the vague, in really wanting to actually build something, right? We have to get out of the vague space.

So let’s use my $1,500 intensive as a jumping off point, not as your target. But I want you to actually ask yourself if you charged $1,500 for a three-hour intensive, what would that be doing for you? Would that number let you drop down to two intensive days a week and call it a full practice? Would it let you finally close your insurance panels? Or is $1,500 not even the right number for your overhead, your market, your goals?

And you need to actually sit down and figure out what number would make you happy and give you the things that you actually want and need. And again, it’s not a question with a universal answer. It is a question you have to do the math on, honestly, with your actual bills and your actual goals in front of you, not just the number that you saw on a comment thread or on my website. A second question that I want you to sit with is what would you charge per hour if you knew with total confidence?

That you could successfully book clients at that rate. Right? This probably may not feel like what you currently charge because you might be scared to test a higher number. This is not about just what feels safe, but what would you charge if the fear of an empty calendar wasn’t in the room while you decided? Right? If that fear was not there, what number would you pick? I know a lot of people say, like, this feels wild, but.

200, 250, 300. And then they actually book clients at that number once they learn the right marketing strategies that I teach them inside the Therapy Intensives Academy. Most therapists have never actually let themselves answer that question, honestly, because again, the fear answers the question first. But it is worth writing down, even if it feels uncomfortable, even if the number that comes to mind seems too high. And

Here’s a third one because I mentioned nights and weekends earlier, and I don’t want to gloss over that because I get a lot of questions about it. But what would actually make it worth it to you to work an evening or a weekend if a client wanted to schedule an intensive during those hours? I am definitely not saying that you have to do that. Plenty of thriving intensive practices run entirely with a Monday through Friday nine to five kind of situation. And that’s a completely valid boundary to hold.

But if you are someone who’d consider it, what would need to be true for that trade to actually feel worth it? It is a rate, is it a rate that is a even more of a premium for after hours booking? Is it capping it at no more than once a month? Is it simply knowing you get to choose when instead of it being expected of you? That all of those answers, those are yours to define. They are not mine, and they’re definitely not the internet’s from, you know, from stranger that you probably will never meet in real life.

So notice what all three of those questions have in common. None of them are what does everyone else charge? They’re all versions of what do you actually want and what would it take to get it? Right. This is a completely different exercise than just pricing by comparison. And it’s the one that actually can help you produce here’s my rate, here’s my structure, and here’s a schedule that I can live inside of and be excited about instead of resentful, right? That is not the point to be resentful of your own practice. You outleft.

Whatever situation you left because you were resentful. Don’t do this to yourself in your own practice. This is exactly the work I walk therapists through inside the Therapy Intensive Academy. I do not just say, here’s my rate, go copy it. I work with you on what is your current rate? What do you want your intensive rate to be? Do those ways even work for you? Do we need to increase it? How does the marketing match that? How do we get your mindset to match it too? Structuring an intensive model around your actual life.

Pricing it based on what you’re trying to buy back rather than what the person three names down on the insurance panel list charges, and building the website and marketing that lets you say your number with confidence instead of an apology that is kind of built into the copy. If you’ve been stuck comparing your numbers to everyone else’s for months, Therapy Intensive Academy is where you stop doing that and start building the version that is actually yours.

I cannot tell you the number of therapists I’ve talked to in the past week. This is August 2026, in the past week who are like, I am overwhelmed with how many people are reaching out to me. I cannot keep up with my voicemails and my emails and my contact forms. That can be your reality. I know there’s a lot being said out there these days about the economy and being fearful to get off insurance panels or to charge a premium rate, but people are out there who will bang down your door.

if they can find you, right? Forget all about big tech and what you’re hearing about it being pointless trying to quote unquote compete against them. You do not have to worry about it. There are things you can do to make this work for you. So before you open one more thread, whether that’s on Facebook, Instagram, I don’t care where you’re looking at it, but whether you if you are looking at just comparing rates, again, I want you to answer the question that is actually underneath it because this is not a competition.

And it’s not just a, you know, what does the market hold? Or do you live in a low cost or high cost of living area? But the real questions underneath it of what are you actually trying to buy back? If you want time, you want peace, you want the ability to say no without panic, a Tuesday that really belongs to you, your family, whatever’s important to you. Once you really know that answer, the rate stops being a mystery. And if you want help figuring out the structure and the pricing and all of the marketing that actually gets you there.

That is the whole reason the Therapy Intensives Academy exists and it is still on sale. I will drop the link in the show notes if you want to sign up before that sale is over. Your rate, again, was never supposed to be my rate. It was supposed to be the number that buys you the life you’re actually trying to build. So skip the comparison this week, right? Really just kind of sit with the real question of what do I want and what is a small step.

That I can take towards actually having it. Thank you so much for being here and listening today. I will see you in the next episode.