Costs can vary.
The member-led neighborhood TimeBank is essentially a club in which dues can be collected and an admin would handle a petty cash account.
We suggest that all members should donate at least two Time Credits per quarter to their Timebank.
Requiring a Time Credit co-payment has the double benefit of lowering the cost of running the TimeBank and making the TimeBank more member-owned to support long-term survival and fundraising success down the road.
After a few years, your TimeBank leaders may want to start projects that partner with other organizations and help those with fewer advantages. They may also want volunteer insurance (the average is $5 per member), background checks (the average is $8 per member), and a paid staff person to organize events and be readily available (the average is $6,000-40,000 per year). All of these add to the admin’s role.
This is the most straightforward and consistent principle for pricing things in Time Credits.
Examples include:
- Pricing arts and crafts items by the time it took to make them.
- Pricing refurbished donated computers based on the time it took to fix them, regardless of the speed and memory capacity of the computer.
- Pricing vegetables by estimating the time it took to tend them and bring them to market.
Many people find this formula to be much easier to use if they can sell items using two currencies at once. Thus, you charge Time Credits for the time it takes to make something and standard money for the cost of the raw materials. For example, a knitted scarf might sell for ten Time Credits and $20 for the cost of the yarn. The technical term for this is a “mixed currency transaction.”
Mixed currency pricing is generally regarded as the simplest, cleanest method of pricing things in Time Credits.
Using broad reward categories to price things
A TimeBank could price things based on broad equivalencies between Time Credits and US Credit prices. For example:
| US$ value | Time Credits price | Value range in US$ |
| 0-20 | 1 | 1.00-20 |
| 21-200 | 10 | 2.10-20 |
| 201-1,000 | 100 | 2.10-10 |