Photography pricing calculator.
Enter your time, your yearly costs, and the margin you want. The calculator returns a session price, a per-image price, and what the year adds up to at that rate.
Nothing is stored. Change a number and the result updates.
- Session price
- $938
- Per digital image
- $23
- Revenue per year
- $56,250
How the number is built
- Labor: (2 + 4) hours at $75 per hour = $450
- Overhead per session: $18,000 divided by 60 sessions = $300
- Cost per session: $450 + $300 = $750
- Session price: $750 divided by (1 minus 20%) = $938
- Per image: session price divided by 40 delivered images, the usual count for a portrait session. Use it as a floor for individual digital sales.
Why price from cost, not from the market.
Most photographers set prices by looking at what nearby photographers charge. That tells you what the market tolerates, not whether you can live on it. A cost-based price tells you the lowest number that still pays you and keeps the business running. Market research then tells you how far above that number you can go.
The two inputs people underestimate are editing hours and overhead. A two-hour portrait session usually carries three to five hours of culling, editing, and delivery. Overhead per session is your whole yearly cost spread across your whole yearly bookings, so a photographer with 30 sessions a year pays twice the overhead per session as one with 60.
Once you have a price, the delivery side matters too. Selling prints and digital add-ons from the gallery raises the revenue per session without raising the session fee. Our gallery commission calculator shows how much of that revenue each platform keeps.
Pricing questions.
Sell from the gallery and keep the whole sale.
PixelPort takes no commission on prints or downloads on any plan. Your prices, your Stripe account.