The usual method for pricing a first workshop is to look at what the studio down the road charged for theirs, take a few euros off because you are less established, and hope.
That produces a number that is either too low to be worth the Saturday or high enough to need twelve people you do not yet have. Neither of those is a price. Both of them are a guess wearing a price's clothes.
The arithmetic here is small. It takes twenty minutes and it changes what you do when four people book.
Start with what the room costs you
Before anything else, find out what you owe the studio, and get it in one sentence you could repeat to someone else. There are usually three shapes.
Flat rent. You pay for the room, you keep everything you take at the door. In most cities this is a few tens of euros an hour for a small studio, more for a big central one, more again on a weekend afternoon. All the risk is yours and all the upside is yours.
A split of the takings. Commonly something like seventy-thirty or sixty-forty in your favor, sometimes fifty-fifty if the studio is doing the promoting and handling bookings. No risk to you, less money per head, and the studio has a reason to fill it.
Rent plus a split. Less common, and worth negotiating away if you can, because you are carrying risk and giving up margin at the same time.
There is a fourth option worth remembering: rooms that are not studios. A community hall, a dance space on its quiet afternoon, someone's shala on a Sunday, a yoga room in a co-working building. Often cheaper, often emptier, and they will frequently do you a rate for a first one if you ask directly.
Whichever shape it is, get the boring details too. Does the rate include mats and props. Does someone let you in, or are you collecting a key from a cafe. Do they take a cut of anything sold. Who keeps the money if a person books and does not turn up.
Then everything else, which is smaller than you think
Room aside, a workshop costs very little, which is the good news.
Payment fees of roughly two to four percent on whatever people pay you online. Whatever you buy: tea, printed handouts, an extra speaker, one thing you did not plan on. Your travel, if it is across town on a Sunday. And your preparation, which for a first two-hour workshop is realistically several evenings, not one.
Add those up and hold them next to the room cost. That total is what you owe the world before a single person walks in.
Break-even headcount is the number, not the price
Take your total cost and divide it by the price you are considering. That is how many people have to come before you earn anything at all.
Do it at three prices. The exercise takes four minutes and it is the whole article.
A cheap ticket in a rented room means a lot of bodies before you are square. A higher ticket in the same room breaks even at a handful, and every person after that is your pay. In a revenue split you break even almost immediately and then earn slowly, which is a completely different kind of risk and worth choosing deliberately.
Whatever comes out, that number is what you manage from the day you announce. Not the price. The headcount.
Write it down and then write down a second number next to it: the headcount at which you would rather not run it at all. Those two numbers, decided while you are calm, are what stop you making a bad decision at eleven at night three days before.
Setting the actual price
A rule of thumb that holds in most cities: a workshop is priced somewhere between two and four times a drop-in class for the same length of time, and something longer or more specialized sits higher than that.
People do not resist paying more for a workshop. They resist paying more for something that sounds like a longer class. The price is carried by the specificity of the thing, not by your years of teaching. "Backbends and the parts of them nobody explains" is a workshop. "Extended vinyasa practice" is a long class with a workshop's price on it, and it fills slowly.
Two more things worth knowing.
Pricing low does not fill a room. It is the most common belief among first-time hosts and it is wrong in a specific way: the people who would come at thirty-five euros are almost exactly the people who would come at fifty, because they are coming for you and for the subject. The ones who would not come at fifty were mostly not coming at thirty-five either.
And a low price makes the whole thing harder to survive. At a low price you need a full room to break even, which means you spend three weeks anxious and then run it at a loss anyway.
Early rates, pairs and the shapes that work
An early rate is useful, not because it makes anything cheaper, but because it moves decisions forward. You find out in week one instead of week four, which is when you still have time to do something about it.
Set it as a date, not as a number of places. "Fifty until the twentieth, sixty after" is honest and easy to say. "Only three early places left" is usually not true and everyone knows it.
A pair rate works well for the same reason it works on retreats: the person bringing a friend does more to fill your room than any post you will write.
Whatever you do, do not discount after you have announced the full price. The people who paid first will notice, and they are the ones you need for the next one.
When four people book instead of twelve
This is the actual moment. It happens to nearly everyone on a first workshop, and the reason it feels catastrophic is that nobody decided in advance what it means.
You have three choices and they are all fine.
Run it anyway. Four people in a room for two hours is a small workshop, not a failed one. Say nothing apologetic. Do not mention the number, do not explain, do not tell them you expected more. Teach it as though it were designed for four, because a room of four can go somewhere a room of twenty cannot, and every one of those four now knows what you are like in a small group. That is where private clients and the second workshop come from.
Change the shape. If four does not work financially in a rented room, move it. Somebody's living room, your own space, a smaller room at the same studio at half the rate. Tell people plainly.
"We are going to be a small group, which means we can go slower and more hands-on, so I have moved us to the small studio upstairs. Same time, same price, better afternoon for it."
Move it. If it is genuinely below the number you decided you would not run at, move the date and say so with no drama.
"I am moving this to the fifteenth so more people can make it. You are booked in for the new date automatically, or if that does not work I will refund you today, no problem at all."
Notice that all three of those are decided by the numbers you wrote down at the start. Without them you are just guessing at eleven at night.
What the studio's cut is actually buying
If a studio takes forty percent, ask what the forty percent does. Sometimes the answer is a lot: they put it on their schedule, it goes out to their whole list, it appears in the app people already book through, and their front desk sells it to everyone who walks in for a week. That is worth paying for, and it is worth more to you on a first workshop than on a fifth.
Sometimes the answer is that they will add it to the website and leave the rest to you. That is a rental with a percentage attached, and you should say so pleasantly and ask for a flat rate instead.
"Happy either way, but if I am doing the filling myself I would rather just rent the room from you. What would a flat rate look like for the Sunday afternoon?"
Worst case they say no and you have learned what the deal actually is.
Decide the floor before you announce
Two numbers, on paper, before the first message goes out: the headcount that pays for the room, and the headcount below which you move it. Then a date, roughly a week before, when you look at the bookings and act.
Do that and the workshop stops being a test of your worth and becomes what it actually is: a small piece of arithmetic with a good afternoon on the other side of it.
And the first one is not really about the money anyway. It is about having something specific enough to have a name, so the second one is easier to fill.