ajrose.co

What It Is

AJ Rose presents a Pricing Co-Pilot / Pricing Calculator for independent creatives, along with the companion Pricing & Positioning Playbook. Its core focus is not traditional project management or financial SaaS, but helping freelancers move away from “gut-feel pricing” by working backward from personal living costs, business overhead, tax burden, and realistic billable hours to calculate a minimum hourly rate and day rate.

Core Features and Product Capabilities

According to the page, the Pricing Calculator works in four steps: personal monthly expenses, business operating costs, estimated tax rate, and annual billable hours. The tool annualizes monthly costs, grosses them up for self-employment and income taxes, and ultimately outputs the required annual revenue, floor rate, and day rate. It also highlights the gap between this approach and the simplistic method of converting a salary based on 2000 hours. This is useful for independent designers, copywriters, consultants, and other creative service providers, because it specifically accounts for non-billable time and business expenses. The Playbook includes 74 pages across 12 chapters, covering profit markup, pricing for invisible deliverables, tiered proposals, and how to present pricing.

Pricing and Limitations

The page lists the Pricing Calculator as Free. The Playbook costs USD 47 as a one-time purchase with lifetime access. The copy also states that Playbook owners get access to the Quick-Quote Calculator and the full Pricing Co-Pilot tools. However, the page also shows a “Restricted · Co-Pilot Tool” section that requires an access code to view results, so the completeness of the free functionality appears limited. No subscription plans, enterprise edition, refund policy, or payment method details were found.

Pros and Cons

The main strengths are its clear positioning and transparent calculation logic. It directly helps freelancers address common issues such as underestimating taxes, ignoring fixed costs, and overestimating billable hours. The one-time price is also relatively easy to accept. The downside is that it is not full-fledged business software: there is no visible information about team collaboration, permissions, audit logs, security compliance, third-party integrations, APIs, or self-hosted deployment. There is also no clear description of a customer support system.

Who It’s For and Access from China

It is best suited for independent creatives, freelance consultants, and small studio owners who want to establish a pricing floor and improve how they communicate their rates. It is not suitable as an enterprise quoting system, CPQ tool, or financial management platform. The page does not provide information about access from China, network stability, or payment availability, so it is recommended to test access and payment before purchasing. Alternatives include Excel/Notion pricing models, or more complete freelance business tools such as Bonsai, HoneyBook, and QuickBooks.