Can't Word the Price Increase Email? The Football Pitch Bench

2026-10-13

The pitch is damp and the coach is shouting something about passing.

You sit on the cold metal bench with your jacket zipped to the chin. In your lap is your phone, and on the phone is a draft that has been open since lunch.

Hi Markus, I wanted to let you know that, unfortunately, from January my rates will…

You delete "unfortunately". You put it back. You delete "wanted to let you know", because it sounds like you are apologising for existing.

Let's call you Jana. You are a freelance designer, and Markus has been your client for four years. This is an illustration, not a real person, but you may know the bench.

The du/Sie problem nobody warns you about

Here is the part that makes it harder than it should be.

Markus said "du" to you in year two, after a long project dinner. His colleague Frau Brandt, who signs off the invoices, still says "Sie". So the email goes to both. Which register do you use?

You try the du version. Too casual for a money message. You try the Sie version. Now it reads like a letter from a law firm, and Markus will wonder what he did wrong.

So you do what you always do. You open a second tab and look at something else. Then you come back and the cursor is still blinking.

On the pitch, someone scores. You clap a beat late.

What the silence costs

The price increase is not really the problem. You know your rates have been the same for three years. You know the groceries cost more, the software costs more, and you are quietly getting better at this work while earning the same.

The problem is the sentence.

Because you can't word it, you don't send it. Because you don't send it, another month goes by at the old rate. You never say that out loud. You just feel it as a small, steady resentment every time you open Markus's project file.

It isn't only price increases, either. There is the polite no to a project that would eat your whole spring. There is the follow-up to a quote that went quiet two weeks ago, and you don't want to sound needy. There is the payment reminder where you rewrite "just a friendly nudge" until it means nothing.

Each of these takes you ten minutes of actual writing and two days of dread.

You are not bad at your job. You are simply alone with every awkward sentence, and nobody is there to say, "Try it like this."

The turning point is small

It doesn't arrive as a revelation. It arrives as a thought on a cold bench.

What if you didn't have to start from a blank screen every time?

You have used AI tools before, and the results were mixed. You typed "write a polite price increase email" and got something stiff and generic, in German that no real person has ever sent. You spent longer fixing it than you would have spent writing it.

The tool wasn't the problem. The question was. A vague request gets a vague answer. What you were missing was a good first sentence to give the tool: who you are writing to, how close you are, whether it is du or Sie, what you want to keep warm and what you want to keep firm.

That is the idea behind a set of ready-made German prompts for client communication. Someone has already thought through the wording problem, and you only fill in the blanks.

A different Thursday

Imagine the same bench, a month later.

The pitch is just as damp. The coach is still shouting about passing.

But the draft to Markus went out on Monday, at 9:20, before your second coffee. It was kind and clear, in the right register, and it said what it needed to say. He wrote back, "Thanks for the heads-up, fine for January." That was the whole reply.

You noticed something odd afterwards. You weren't triumphant, just lighter. The knot you had carried for weeks was simply gone.

This Thursday, the only thing on your phone is a message from a friend about the weekend. A late invoice from another client got its reminder on Tuesday, and it sounded like you on a good day. The "no" to the spring project went out last week, and it was warm enough that they asked to keep you in mind for autumn.

Nobody had to be a stranger to the language of their own business. You have words for the awkward moments now, and you don't dread them anymore.

When the final whistle blows, you stand up, stretch your back, and walk to the car. Your evening is still yours.

If you recognised the bench

We made a collection for exactly these moments: KI-Prompts für Kundenkommunikation. It has 60 German AI prompts for payment reminders, price increases, polite refusals and follow-ups. Most come with du and Sie variants and examples, so you can see what a good result looks like. You get it as a PDF to read and as Markdown to copy and paste.

It doesn't write your business for you. You still read every message and decide what goes out, and the AI is only a first draft you shape. It was made with AI and checked automatically, and it is for organising your wording, not for legal or tax questions.

If you would like to look, it's here: KI-Prompts für Kundenkommunikation (60 Prompts, Deutsch). It comes with a 30-day money-back promise. If it doesn't help, you get a full refund, no questions.

And if not today, that's fine too. The draft to Markus will still be there. When you're ready, it can sound like you.

An illustrative story, written with AI assistance.