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The money side

What a year of this costs you, and the least a day can be worth.

Almost every photographer who has ever set a price set it by looking at what somebody else charges. This works it out the other way round (from your own numbers) and shows you every step, so you can argue with any of it.

One thing we will not do: tell you what anybody else charges. We have no figures on that yet, and inventing a plausible-looking range would be worse than saying so.

You are not signed in, and you do not need to be. This works exactly the same either way. Make an account if you want the numbers kept.

Where are you with this?

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Where are you with this?

There is no wrong answer and nothing is unlocked by picking a bigger one. It changes the wording of what we show you, nothing else.

What do you do, or want to do, for money?

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What do you do, or want to do, for money?

Pick as many as you like, or none. It is the same list you saw at the gear door, because what you shoot, what you are taught, and what you sell are the same three answers.

A town, a county, “mostly online”. Whatever is true. We do not have any figures about your area yet, so this is stored to be said back to you rather than used to work anything out.

In your own words. One line is plenty, and it is fine to leave it blank.

What does a year of this cost you?

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What does a year of this cost you?

Yearly figures, and every single box may be left empty. A rough number beats a blank; a blank beats a made-up one. Whatever you leave out, we will tell you it is missing and which way it moves the answer.

Cameras, lenses, cards and batteries wear out and get dropped. Spreading the replacement across the years you use them is the difference between a good year and a year that only looked good until something broke. A rough yearly figure is fine: what you spent last year, or what you would need to put aside to replace one big thing.

a year

Kit cover and liability cover. Many venues and most commercial clients will not let you work without the second one, so it is a cost of being allowed to do the job at all. The yearly premium, or your best guess if you have not bought it yet.

a year

Editing software, cloud storage, your website, a scheduling tool, a music licence. Individually small, and together they can be one of the largest lines on your year. Add up the monthly ones and multiply by twelve.

a year

Editing wears out a computer faster than anything else you own, and the drives holding a client's only copy of their pictures have to be replaced on a schedule rather than when they fail. What a replacement machine and a fresh set of drives cost, divided by the years you get out of them.

a year

Fuel, parking, mileage, the occasional night away. This is the line that quietly decides whether a job an hour away was worth taking. Last year's fuel and parking, or a guess at what you drive in a normal month times twelve.

a year

Website hosting, adverts, print samples, the fee for a listing site. Work does not arrive on its own, and the cost of making it arrive belongs in the price of the work. Anything you spend to get seen, over a year.

a year

Courses, workshops, memberships. Ours are free, which does not make this line zero. The field moves and the good workshops are not. What you expect to spend this year on getting better at it.

a year

Studio rent, storage, or the honest share of your home that the business actually uses. Leave it blank if you work out of a bag and a spare room you would be paying for anyway.

a year

Bookkeeping, tax filing, a licence, an hour of a lawyer's time for a contract. Small, annual, and easy to forget when you are pricing a first job. What you paid, or expect to pay, for that help this year.

a year

Card processing, invoicing platforms, bank charges. A few percent of everything you are paid never reaches you, so the price has to carry it. A few percent of what you expect to invoice, if you have no better number.

a year
The two numbers that turn all of that into a day rate

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The two numbers that turn all of that into a day rate

The first one is the easiest of the four to get wrong, and it is worth being honest with yourself about it.

Days billed, not days worked. Editing, quoting, driving, answering messages and chasing work are all real days that nobody pays for. Most working photographers bill somewhere well under a hundred days a year, and dividing by two hundred and fifty is how a person ends up with a rate that loses them money.

After everything above is paid for and after tax. This is the number you live on. Leave it blank and we will show you what you break even at, which pays you nothing.

a year

As a percentage of what is left after costs. We deliberately do not suggest a figure. It depends on how you are set up and where you are, and we are not the right people to tell you. It is a good question for an accountant, and leaving it blank simply leaves tax out of the sum.

%

Only if you charge anything yet. We use it for one thing: to tell you if you are already fine, which is an answer we would rather give than not.

a day
Nothing here is sent anywhere or shown to anybody. You can change every number later, as often as you like.

Already filled some of this in? Go straight to the answer.