Career advice lives inside a politeness trap. The culture says knowledge-sharing should be free — the coffee chat, the "quick call," the LinkedIn DM asking you to review a resume "whenever you get a sec." If your content about job searching, interviews, or salary negotiation has built an audience, you're now fielding dozens of these requests a week. Each one is flattering. Together they're a part-time unpaid job, and saying yes to all of them means saying no to your paying work and your own time.
Here's the reframe: a price is not a wall, it's a filter. The follower facing a real decision — an offer expiring Friday, an interview Monday morning — will happily pay for twenty minutes of your judgment. The brain-picker will not, and that's the system working.
What career coaches sell on Cheddify
Per-minute advice calls
Toggle yourself available and followers can tap your bio link, pay as guests in the browser, and get you live. The urgent moments are where this shines: "I negotiate salary tomorrow — what do I say?" is a fifteen-minute call. "They gave me an exploding offer, help" is ten. The meter runs per minute, so quick questions cost little and the client controls the spend. No scheduling ping-pong, no invoice afterward.
Booked prep sessions
The bigger jobs get scheduled: mock interviews, full resume and LinkedIn overhauls, career-pivot strategy sessions at 30 to 60 minutes. Paid at booking — which ends both no-shows and the awkward moment where a "quick chat" was supposed to become an invoice but somehow never did. If you currently run this through a scheduler and hope, see the Calendly alternative for paid calls.
Paid DM reviews
Set a DM price and the "can you look at my resume?" message becomes a product. They pay, attach the resume or the offer letter or the awkward recruiter email, and you reply with your read when you're free. Async, bounded, paid.
The three products also ladder neatly: a paid DM resume review becomes a booked mock interview, which becomes a per-minute call the night before the real conversation — one client, three moments, all of them paid.
What should career coaches charge?
Sellers in this niche commonly charge $2 to $8 per minute, with $4 a common middle — $240 per hour at the meter, though most advice calls run 15 to 30 minutes. If you coach senior professionals or specialize in negotiation, where your advice has direct dollar impact, the top of the range is defensible. Paid DM resume reviews commonly run $20 to $50. More in how to sell your time as a coach.
A worked example
You charge $4 per minute and take a 15-minute salary-negotiation call the night before a client's offer conversation: they pay $60, plus about 3% card processing billed to them on top. Cheddify takes 20% + $2 per call, so you keep 80% of $60 ($48) minus $2 — $46, paid out via Stripe. If your advice moves their offer by even $2,000, that's the cheapest $60 they ever spent — which is exactly why this call sells. Fee details on the pricing page.
The honest part: Cheddify brings you zero clients
Cheddify is a tool, not a marketplace. There is no directory and no discovery traffic — every client comes from your own audience on LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube tapping your link. If your career content earns comments and DM requests, that audience is your demand and Cheddify is the conversion layer. If you don't have an audience yet, a discovery-driven expert platform is the better starting point — see Minnect alternatives — while you build one. Claiming your link is free: how it works.