askmore.studio

Salary negotiation · United States

You're asking $131,000.
The market pays $152,000.

$21,000
Median
You
$90K$210K

You're short $21,000 a year.

That's $210,000 over ten years at the same level — before counting what every raise on top of it would have compounded to.

Example: Backend engineer · 5 years · Austin · illustrative figures

Find my numberFree · no account · 30 seconds

Knowing your number isn't the hard part. Saying it out loud is.

The order matters. You can't rehearse before you know your band, and you shouldn't negotiate before you've rehearsed.

  1. 012 minutes

    Find your number

    Role, level, location. You land on the actual band for your market — not a national average that describes nobody.

  2. 0220 minutes a session

    Practice out loud

    A recruiter who pushes back: the silence, the posted range, the question about your current pay. Replay the line you caved on as many times as it takes.

  3. 03The day of

    Go get it

    Your case in three points, and your emails already written: counteroffer, follow-up after silence, the raise conversation with your manager.

The practice room

The recruiter won't let you finish your sentence

It runs the way the real call runs: the question asked too early, the number pulled out of you, the silence you rush to fill. Your coach annotates as it happens, and you can replay any line.

  • New offer
  • Counteroffer
  • Raise conversation
  • Promotion, no budget
  • Going contract

  • Recruiter

    Before we go further — what are you looking for, comp-wise?

  • You

    The posting listed 140 to 165. I'm at the top of that range. Can I walk you through why?

    Right move. The range is public, so anchoring below it costs you money for no reason.

  • Recruiter

    We usually save the top of the band for people with more direct experience.

    This is the standard push, and it is not a no. Don't argue about experience — make them price the work instead.

What stops you from asking is almost never the number

“I'll come across as greedy.”

Recruiters negotiate for a living. A number backed by market data reads as someone who knows their level — what actually stands out is the candidate who takes the first offer without a word.

“The range was posted. That's the range.”

Posted bands are wide by design, and most offers land in the bottom third. The top exists for someone. Nothing stops that person from being you.

“I already said yes on the phone.”

Nothing is real until the offer letter is signed. Coming back on a number is normal — once, quickly, and with a reason. We'll write that email with you.

“I don't have a competing offer.”

Leverage isn't another offer, it's what replacing you costs. By the time comp comes up, they've already spent weeks and thousands of dollars on this hire.

Finding your number costs nothing

You pay for the practice, not the diagnosis. One negotiation that lands pays for years of it — that's the whole arithmetic.

Where you stand

FreeNo account

  • Your position on the market band
  • Your gap, this year and over ten
  • One practice interview
Find my number

The full prep

$29per month, cancel anytime

  • Unlimited practice, every scenario
  • Replay any line, and a score per session
  • Your case, built from your role and level
  • Emails ready to send: counteroffer, follow-up, raise
Start preparing

Questions we get

Where do the numbers come from?
Job postings with disclosed pay — now required in a growing list of states — plus public compensation studies and salaries our users report. Every band shows how many data points it rests on, and says so plainly when that number is small.
Can my employer see that I use askmore?
No. Nothing is public, nothing is shared, and no identifying data enters the aggregated bands. You can delete everything in one click.
Does this work if I already have the job?
That's the most common case. Asking for a raise internally has its own rules — the timing, who you ask, whether the budget is already allocated — and its own practice scenario.
What if I negotiate and it backfires?
Offers are not pulled because a candidate asked for more. What goes badly is an unprepared ask: no reasoning, wrong moment, a number out of nowhere. That is precisely what you rehearse first.

Nobody negotiates well the first time. That's the point of doing it before the call instead of during it.

Find my numberFree · no account · 30 seconds