Calculator
What your flat birth fee really pays per hour
Enter your fee and the hours a birth client genuinely takes, and see the hourly rate hiding inside the flat number.
Free tools
Free calculators for doula fees and on call capacity
Two small tools for the two numbers most doula practices are guessing at: the real hourly rate behind a flat birth fee, and how many windows you can hold at once.
Doula pricing conversations go in circles because the arithmetic is rarely written down. A flat birth fee sounds like one number, but it is paying for prenatal visits, an unknown number of hours in a room, a postpartum visit, travel at hours nobody else drives, a share of your backup, and five weeks of not leaving town. Until those hours are on paper, a fee raise feels like a personality question instead of a math question.
Capacity is the same story. Doulas talk about clients per month as though a client were a day of work, when a client is really a stretch of weeks during which the phone stays on. Both calculators below run in your browser, hold nothing, and start with defaults drawn from ordinary US independent practice so the numbers mean something before you change a single field.
Calculator
How many due date windows can you actually hold
Enter your window length, your recovery time and your backup depth, and see how much overlap you are carrying on an average day.
Working document
The on call readiness checklist for doulas
Everything that should be true about a birth client before her window opens, in the order it needs to happen.
Open to any doula, no account needed
Neither calculator asks for an email address. A doula should not have to hand over her contact details to find out what her flat birth fee pays per hour once two prenatals, the drive at 2 a.m., the labor itself, the postpartum visit and her backup retainer have all been counted. Both run in the browser on the page you are already reading, the figures stay on your screen, and closing the tab leaves nothing behind.
They are worth running even if you never open the on call calendar. This arithmetic currently gets done in the car outside a prenatal or not at all: a birth fee divided by the hours a client genuinely takes rather than the hours spent in the room, then due dates counted off on a wall calendar to see whether a 39 week window and a 41 week window are going to sit on the same Tuesday night. Written down once, those two numbers decide the fee you quote at your next inquiry call and whether you say yes to a fourth due date in the same month.
When the numbers say the month is too full
An hourly rate you do not like and a stacking figure above one are both calendar problems, and the calendar is where they get solved. A demo shows the overlap appearing at the moment an inquiry arrives rather than at 39 weeks, and the balance date sitting on the window instead of in your head. Bring the figures you just worked out and we will start there.