Real numbers for every kind of help — a private coach, employer-paid outplacement, subscription tools, and free options — and how to decide what you actually need in your first weeks after a layoff.
Outpace Solo Team
Updated September 2026 · 7 min read
If you just lost your job, someone has probably told you to “get a career coach.” Good advice, in the abstract. The problem is that nobody tells you what it costs, and the prices you find when you look are hard to read against a bank balance that just stopped growing. Here is the actual market, from the most expensive option to the free ones, with what each is good for.
Private coach
$150–$400 / hour
Often packaged as $1,000–$3,000 for a few sessions. You book them yourself.
Outplacement
$2,000–$10,000
Per person, but bought by employers for their staff. If yours didn't, it doesn't exist for you.
Outpace Solo
$0 to start
The full Career Assessment program is free. Starter is $19 and Pro is $49 as a one-off — no subscription.
Those three rows are different markets, not three prices for the same thing. Here is what each one actually buys.
Independent coaches in the United States typically charge between $150 and $400 per hour, with resume-heavy specialists and executive coaches above that. Most don’t sell single hours; they sell packages of three to six sessions for $1,000 to $3,000, because one hour rarely changes anything.
What you get for that is real: a human who hears your story, notices what you’re avoiding, runs a live mock interview and tells you honestly how you came across, and makes introductions. If you can afford it and find a good one, it is usually worth it. Two honest caveats: quality varies enormously in an unregulated market, and the coach is only as useful as the hours you can afford — many people run out of sessions right when the reps were starting to work.
The big firms — LHH, Randstad RiseSmart, INTOO, Careerminds and their peers — charge employers several thousand dollars per employee. That’s the service HR buys when a company does a round of layoffs well.
If your former employer bought it, take it; it includes resume work, coaching hours and sometimes job leads. But it was never sold to individuals, which is why most laid-off people — especially outside senior leadership — get none of it. It is the most expensive help on the market and the hardest to reach exactly when you need it. We wrote a separate guide on what to do when you need outplacement and don’t have it.
A second tier sits between a human and a blank page. Teal+ runs $13 a week or $29 a month ($79 a quarter); resume scanners, LinkedIn optimizers and interview simulators price similarly. Each is good at its slice — a resume scanner scans resumes, an interview simulator drills interviews.
What none of them sell is the sequence: which of those things to do, in what order, today. After a layoff, that decision — “what should I work on?” — is the expensive one, and it lands on you every morning.
State employment offices and nonprofit workforce centers offer free workshops and resume reviews; worth using, and slower than they look from the outside. ChatGPT, Claude and friends are free and genuinely capable — but they are a blank box: no memory of your plan, no sense of what tomorrow should be, and you are your own program manager. At 2am in week two, that is a heavier ask than it sounds.
Strip the categories down and you’re buying one of three things: expertise (knowing what good looks like), structure (deciding what to do next so you don’t have to), and accountability (someone noticing when you stop). The $300-an-hour coach sells all three. The $29-a-month tool sells a sliver of the first.
Most recently laid-off people need structure and accountability first, expertise second — a plan you can afford to follow beats a brilliant plan you can’t. That’s the gap Outpace Solo is built for: an AI career program manager that reads what you’ve done and gives you exactly one concrete action a day, ten to twenty minutes each, each one ending in something visible. The Career Assessment program is free, and you can see how the daily Next Move works here.
If you want the paid tiers later: Starter is $19 and Pro is $49, both one-time for 90 days — no subscription, nothing renews automatically, and when a paid window ends your account returns to the permanent Free tier with everything you built still available. Outpace Solo itself is built and run by AI agents on NanoCorp, which is what makes a $0 first month a real product and not a trial.
Ask yourself two questions. First: can I afford $1,000+ without borrowing? If no, the human coach is out for now, and that’s a plan, not a failure. Second: do I know exactly what I’m doing tomorrow morning? If yes, you may need nothing — go do it. If no, that’s the thing to fix first, and it’s the cheapest thing on this page to fix: start free, finish your first session today, and let the program decide tomorrow for you. For the momentum side of that decision, the first-week guide walks through it day by day.
Your first session takes about a minute and ends with your own Exit Story Card. No credit card, no email required.