What Factors Into Pricing a Horseback Ride

We get this question from time to time from Karens: why are your horseback rides priced the way they are?

The answer, lady, is a lot of things.

The horse itself

Obviously, we need to buy a horse. There are two ways to look at a horse: one is as a commodity, another is as a product.

As a commodity, we treat it like a replaceable business expense: it has a finite lifespan, so extend that lifespan as long as possible and pay the least amount for it.

As a product, we treat it like we would a child: it’s going to grow and foster, and we need to invest in it in order to get the most out of it.

The price of a horse in Mexico is all over the place. You can pay $500 USD or you can pay $5,000 USD, or anything in between.

The horses on the lower end are like a lower-end car: lower maintenance costs that you can opt out of and it will “still run”, more health issues, probably not as reliable — figure a Geo Prism. The horses on the higher end are like a higher-end car: there are costs associated with maintenance and they are just a part of the journey, fewer health issues if you choose to treat it right — figure a Toyota Avalon.

We buy Toyota Avalons.

Health insurance

We make sure our horses are happy and healthy. We don’t overwork our horses. We retain our veterinarian year-round to do regular checkups on our horses to ensure they’re ready to go.

Rent (well, our mortgage, really)

We have to keep the horses somewhere. We are just fifteen minutes away from the action in Puerto Vallarta, which means that fancy condos could go up at any time! Instead of letting more luxury condos infiltrate our space — frankly, we’re really not concerned about it — for better or for worse… it’d be nice to retire some day — we put horses there.

Feeding the horses

You know how everyone on the news says grocery prices are going up? So is the cost of food for the horses. You know how everyone on the news says that gas prices are going up? That also impacts the cost of food for the horses. Feeding horses can be cheap, or can be really expensive.

We could buy the horses the equivalent of Purina Dog Food — you know, cheap as hell with a bunch of filler. We don’t. We get the Fromm horse feed. If you know how expensive Fromm is, you know what we mean.

We do this because we care for our horses. They are not just a tool to operate a business; they are a living, breathing, pooping thing.

Labor

Yes, the Mexican just made a labor joke! Huzzah!

We have some of the longest-tenured employees imaginable. Tomas himself as been with us since before he was born, I think. I don’t know, I need to check, but he’s been here forever.

This loyalty isn’t cheap, people. Tomas gets paid vacations. Do you know how hard it is to replace Tomas? It’s impossible.

Gear

We provide authentic gear: from saddles to helmets. This isn’t cheap.

Tech and development

Our development costs are free because the gringo does all the work, and the gringo believes in our mission so much that we convinced him to do it for free. He’s really great. You would like him.

Here’s a table of our current operating costs for our technology stuffs:

• SquareSpace: $50/month

  • We have to pay for the fancy version of SquareSpace because we need to use their code injection feature for our booking system

• Heroku: $117/month

  • This hosts our apps. It’s reliable and we don’t have to think twice about it

• Google Apps: $10/month

  • This hosts our email. It’s reliable and the only thing that we have to worry about is ever contacting Google support

• Development: Free

  • If you’re asking why we don’t use existing booking software, we don’t really have a solid reason other than it wasn’t as big of a pain to build our own as you would think. We tried some options, like SquareSpace Appointments, Bookly, ScheduleCity, SimplyBook, Zoho (actually really good, but we needed some features that they didn’t offer)

  • By building our own we also have the most flexibility, though obviously at a cost of development time and bugs

• Domain: $12/year

  • Back in the day domains were like $4/year. Blame Biden!11one

Our tech costs are currently $178 USD a month. Yes, very small for your typical tech startup (which we are not). Have you used our booking system? All in-house!

Taxes

Life, death, and taxes. Taxes are baked into our pricing.

Insurance

We have business insurance!

I am running out of ideas

Sebastian doesn’t even know that I’m writing this yet.