Photography pricing calculator from your own numbers.
"Know your cost of doing business" is the advice in every pricing thread. This does the math. Type in your gear, your monthly costs and the real hours a job takes, and it shows the least a job can pay without costing you money, and what you're really earning per hour today.
The numbers below are examples, a $50 family shoot, so you can see how it works. Replace them with yours.
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- Real hours per job
- Yearly overhead
- Overhead each job carries
- Hourly rate used
How the floor is worked out
Overhead. Your gear is spread across the years you'll use it, then added to a year of monthly costs. That total is shared out across the jobs you expect to do, so every job carries its part.
Time. Every hour of the job counts: booking messages, driving, the shoot, backing up, culling, editing, delivery and invoicing. A two-hour shoot is usually three or four times that in real work.
The floor is your hours times your hourly rate, plus the job's share of overhead, plus travel. It isn't what you should charge. It's the line you shouldn't go under.
If your floor is more than clients will pay
Make the job smaller, not cheaper. Shorter sessions, fewer finished images and clients who come to you all cut the hours, so a smaller budget buys a smaller job and the math still works.
Why it doesn't tell you what others charge
Rates vary by town, by type of work and by how strong a portfolio is. Your costs and your hours are the only numbers that are really yours, so that's where this starts.