Most Nigerian business owners set prices by feel — or by looking at what a competitor charges and knocking off ₦500. This guide shows you a better way.
Here is a situation many business owners recognise: you are always busy, clients keep coming, you raised your price once — and you still end the month with nothing in the bank.
The problem is usually not your sales volume. It is that your price was never built on what it actually costs you to do the work.
The Lucrive pricing calculator is designed to fix this. It takes your real costs — materials, labour, overhead — and shows you two numbers: the floor price (the minimum you can charge without losing money) and the recommended price (what you should actually charge to make a healthy profit).
Want the short version? See: How to Price Your Product or Service in Nigeria — A Simple Walkthrough
The calculator uses a 5-step form. Each step collapses when complete, so you can see your whole cost picture at once. The results panel updates in real time as you fill in each field.
① Production Volume — how many units you make and how many you expect to sell
② Materials — your total monthly material spend (the calculator divides it per unit)
③ Labour — four types of labour cost, plus an optional rework rate
④ Overhead — your fixed monthly business costs not already entered in Step 3
⑤ Pricing Strategy — your target margin and safety buffer
After completing the steps, the results panel on the right shows your floor price, your recommended price, and — if you choose to enter your current price — a diagnosis of whether you are making money or losing it.
Units produced per month
How many items do you make, or how many service jobs do you complete, each month? This is your production capacity.
Units to sell per month
How many do you actually expect to sell? For most businesses this is the same as production — but if you make goods that go into stock (e.g. a baker who makes 200 loaves but only sells 160 and freezes the rest), enter the sales number here.
Why this matters: Overhead costs are recovered over the units you sell, not the units you make. If you produce 100 items but only sell 60, you cannot recover your overhead across 100 — you have to recover it across 60. The remaining 40 sit in inventory as an asset to sell later.
Wastage
If some of your production is always lost — burnt batches, cut fabric scraps, spoiled produce — select your wastage category. Common rates: retail general 2.5%, food production 8%, textile/garments 5%. The calculator reduces your effective production by the wastage rate before computing cost per unit.
Adeola makes 90 trays of jollof rice per month. She sells all 90. She estimates about 8% of her ingredients are wasted. She enters:
The calculator now knows she effectively produces 83 sellable trays from 90 batches of ingredients.
Total monthly material spend (₦)
Enter the total you spend on raw materials each month — not per unit. If you spend ₦270,000 per month on tomatoes, rice, oil, and packaging for all 90 trays, enter ₦270,000.
The calculator divides this by your effective production (after wastage) to arrive at the material cost per unit. Adeola's material cost per tray: ₦270,000 ÷ 83 effective trays = ₦3,253 per tray.
This approach is more accurate than estimating per-unit cost yourself — most business owners buy in bulk and it is easier to total the month's purchases than to estimate each ingredient per job.
This is where most business owners undercount their costs. The calculator has four labour fields — use all that apply to your business.
Monthly staff cost (₦)
Fixed salaries for permanent staff directly involved in production. If Adeola pays a kitchen assistant ₦60,000/month, she enters ₦60,000 here.
Daily wage rate (₦/day) × days worked per month
For casual workers paid by the day. If Adeola hires extra help at ₦3,000/day for 10 days a month, she enters ₦3,000 and 10 days. The calculator multiplies them: ₦30,000.
Piece-rate cost per unit (₦)
For workers paid per item produced — common in manufacturing and garment businesses. If each tray attracts ₦50 in packaging labour, enter ₦50.
Your own labour (₦/month)
This is the one most business owners skip — and it is the most important.
If you spend 20 hours a week working in your business, your time has a market value. What would you pay someone else to do what you do? If a qualified chef in Lagos earns ₦120,000/month, then Adeola's own labour costs her business ₦120,000 — even if she never pays herself that amount.
Owners who enter ₦0 here are giving away their own labour for free. The business looks profitable on paper. They are not actually earning anything.
You can enter ₦0 deliberately — perhaps you are in a startup phase and not yet paying yourself. But make it a conscious choice.
Rework / redo rate (%)
How often do you redo a job for free? A tailor who re-sews a dress, a graphic designer whose first draft is rejected, a caterer who remakes a dish — all of these consume labour time that was never charged to the client.
If about 1 in 10 of your jobs requires rework, enter 10. The calculator adds 10% to your effective labour cost to account for this. If rework never happens in your business, leave it at 0.
Labour cost per tray: ₦210,000 ÷ 90 trays produced = ₦2,333 per tray
Monthly Overhead (₦)
Overhead is every fixed business cost that is not tied to a specific job — and not already entered in Step 3.
This means: rent, electricity, generator fuel, internet, POS fees, equipment maintenance, insurance. It does not mean staff wages — those were entered in Step 3. Entering staff salaries in both places will inflate your price unnecessarily.
These costs exist whether you sell 10 trays or 100. They must be recovered through your prices.
Adeola's overhead: rent ₦80,000 + generator ₦30,000 + gas ₦25,000 + transport ₦20,000 + bank charges ₦8,000 = ₦163,000/month
Overhead per tray: ₦163,000 ÷ 90 units to sell = ₦1,811 per tray
Professional tier users can track overhead by category — rent, utilities, bank charges, and more — using the full overhead panel. The total flows through automatically.
Target Margin (%)
The percentage of your selling price you want to keep as profit. Common benchmarks for Nigerian MSMEs:
If you are not sure, start with 30%.
Safety Buffer (%)
An extra cushion for unexpected cost increases — a supplier raises their price mid-month, a delivery is damaged, fuel goes up. The buffer sits between your floor price and your target margin, so your price covers surprises before they eat into profit. A typical buffer is 5–10%. Free tier users are capped at 5%. Professional users can set up to 25%.
VAT
If you are VAT-registered, toggle this on. The calculator adds 7.5% to the displayed price.
The results panel shows three layers.
① Floor Price (minimum viable price)
This is the total cost per unit — materials + labour + overhead — with no profit at all. Selling below this number means every sale makes you poorer. This is the absolute floor; your price should always be above it.
Adeola's floor price per tray: ₦3,253 + ₦2,333 + ₦1,811 = ₦7,397
② Recommended Price
Floor price + safety buffer + target margin. This is the price you should charge.
With a 5% buffer and 30% margin: ₦7,397 × 1.05 × 1.30 = ₦10,107 per tray
Adeola was charging ₦6,500. The calculator shows she was selling ₦897 below her floor price — losing money on every tray, before she paid herself a single naira.
③ Diagnosis vs your current price (optional)
If you are already selling this product, enter your current price in the "Diagnose Past Performance" section. The calculator tells you exactly how you compare to the recommended price. This section is optional — skip it if you are pricing something new.
If the calculator shows Critical, do not wait. Look first at whether you can reduce wastage or overhead. If not, the price must go up. Continuing at a loss is worse than any uncomfortable conversation with a client about pricing.
If your business makes more than one product, use Multi-Product mode. You enter your total overhead once, then add each product. The calculator allocates overhead to each product based on its share of total sales volume — so you are never double-counting.
Each product card in Multi-Product mode has the same 4-step structure: production volumes, materials, labour (4 types + rework), pricing strategy. The comparison table at the bottom shows all products side by side with floor price, recommended price, monthly profit, and status.
The pricing calculator is most useful as a regular check, not a one-time exercise. Costs change — flour prices move, generator fuel goes up, staff salaries increase. A price that was healthy six months ago may be critical today.
① Check costs at the start of each quarter
② Update material spend whenever a supplier changes their rate
③ Recalculate after any change to your overhead
④ Review your diagnosis before quoting any large or unusual job
Setting a price without knowing your real costs is guessing. The Lucrive pricing calculator turns your actual numbers — total material spend, four types of labour including your own time, overhead, and your target margin — into a price that is grounded in reality.
Use it once to find out where you stand. Use it regularly to stay ahead of cost changes. And if it shows Critical, fix that today.