Darren Tredgold: Moneymaxxing Doesn't Mean Your Customers Want Cheap

A client called me in a panic last month. He runs a plumbing business south of Canberra, and he had just watched a competitor drop their callout fee by forty dollars. He wanted to match it by Friday.

So I asked him one question. Had he lost a single job to that competitor yet?

He hadn't. So we left his pricing alone.

That call sits at the centre of something I keep seeing across our client base. Cost-of-living pressure is real, and people are talking about money more openly than they have in years. But business owners keep reading that conversation as a demand for cheaper, and it isn't.

The word doing the rounds online is moneymaxxing. It comes from the same family as looksmaxxing and sleepmaxxing, and it turns money habits into a game. Budget tracking, high-yield savings, points hacking, side income, all of it scored and shared.

Here is the part most people miss. Moneymaxxing is about optimisation, not austerity. Someone deep in that mindset is not hunting for the cheapest option. Instead they are hunting for the option that makes them feel clever.

Those are very different customers, though they look identical from behind a counter.

Australian data backs the split. The household saving ratio climbed back to 6.1 percent in the 2025 financial year after bottoming out at 3 percent, so people genuinely are holding onto more. Meanwhile Finder's cost of living pressure gauge sits in its very high band at 82 percent. Money is tight and money is being managed. Neither of those facts means your customer wants the discount bin.

Australian small businesses worked this out before the marketing industry did. Xero surveyed 500 of them before Black Friday last year, and only 39 percent planned to discount. That was down 22 points in a single year. Nearly a third said outright they could not afford it, while 64 percent still felt pressure to compete with the big brands anyway.

Customers noticed too. CHOICE found that 53 percent of Australians who bought something in a Black Friday sale either regretted it or had a bad experience.

So the discount does not even buy goodwill. It buys a customer who now knows your real number, and who will wait for that number again next time. Damien Hodgkinson from Olvera Advisors put it better than I can when he said the discount model is very hard to escape once you start, because you condition people to wait.

I have watched three clients do this over five years. Each one climbed out slowly and painfully.

The alternative is not charging more and hoping people feel good about it. That fails just as fast.

What works is arithmetic the customer can check. CHOICE ran the numbers on café coffee and found that one large cup a day at $5.50 comes to roughly $2,000 a year. That is a real figure from a source nobody suspects of selling espresso machines, which is exactly why it lands.

Notice what CHOICE did not do. They never claimed you would save $3,300, the way coffee machine retailers tend to. They stated their assumptions and let the reader argue.

Your business has a version of this. The plumber who called me sells inspections that cost $280 and prevent $6,000 slab leaks. The gym down the road replaces a $95 casual class habit. An accountant stops a penalty. Every one of those is a displacement argument, and every one of them dies the moment you inflate it.

Be careful here, because the ACCC is watching this space. Their greenwashing sweep looked at 247 businesses and found 57 percent making vague or misleading claims. Substantiation notices apply to value and savings claims the same way they apply to environmental ones. If you cannot prove the number, do not print it.

Warranties solve this neatly. Bellroy backs its products for three years and says plainly that making things you replace less often is the whole point. That is not a claim about durability. Rather it is a guarantee, and guarantees never need substantiating because they are the substantiation.

Now I get to bang my usual drum. Going deeper beats going wider, and value positioning is the clearest example I know.

A national chain arguing that it saves you money has to argue on price, because that is all it has. You have proximity. When someone drives across town to save eleven dollars, they burn forty minutes and a chunk of fuel getting there. That is a genuine saving you can quantify honestly, and no chain can copy it.

You also have a reputation that lives or dies in a catchment of a few thousand people. A chain absorbs a bad review. You cannot, so your customers know your incentives sit alongside theirs. That trust is worth a premium, and it is worth saying out loud.

One more thing, because this part moves fast. When someone asks an AI assistant whether a service is worth it in their suburb, that assistant pulls from a handful of sources. Two to seven, in most testing.

So being the cheapest option gives a language model nothing to say about you. Cheap is not a differentiator, it is a category. But a business with clear pricing, published assumptions, a stated warranty and specific outcomes gives that model something worth quoting.

Write the page that answers the question directly in the first fifty words. Put the maths in plain text where it can be read. Then let your competitors keep dropping their callout fee by forty dollars.