Cost of Doing Business for Photographers with Reasonable Prices

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Understanding the cost of doing business for photographers is essential when running a successful photography business. CODB ensures that you are pricing your services competitively while covering your expenses. Sustaining your business while enjoying it and making a living was why you pursued your dream and became a business owner, wasn’t it? That very reason calls for a sensible approach. By calculating your costs accurately, you can develop a reasonable pricing strategy that aligns with industry standards and allows you to stay profitable.

Funny enough, some photography clients use the term “reasonable price” when asking around for someone inexpensive. It’s like they’re trying to soften the blow before they hit you with the lowball offer. They’re afraid to admit publicly that they are either cheap or see little value in your craft, projecting their consumer reasoning on your business strategy. This article and calculators are also meant to illustrate the complex and eye-opening reasons for professional photographers to charge “arm and a leg”… reasonably.

How Photographers Utilize Business Calculators for Reasonable Pricing

Business calculators like the ones below will help you determine your hourly rate based on your total cost of doing business for photographers (CODB), the number of billable and total hours available, and the desired profit margin. Doing this instead of guesswork or trial-and-error will allow you to set competitive prices and market your services effectively.

Here are the steps:

1. Calculate all your business costs   Jump to Calculator 1
2. Determine your cost of living   Jump to Calculator 2
3. Figure out your work and billable hours
4. Work out hourly rates to cover costs and living
5. Evaluate the actual number of hours per job
6. Calculate rock-bottom and make-a-living quotes   Jump to Calculator 3
7. Adjust the final per-job quote if needed

1. Calculate Business Costs

First off, knowing the total cost of running your photography business is crucial for making informed decisions about charging your clients. It allows you to calculate the cost of everything, including the obscure ones like self-employment tax and liability insurance. By calculating your annual costs and the number of billable hours you can work, you can adjust your pricing to ensure that you are not losing money and that your business isn’t just sustaining but thriving.

Here’s a thorough list of all expenses so you don’t miss anything now or later when your business grows. We prefilled our calculators with numbers more or less relevant to Zorz Studios’ cost of doing business. They are not exact but reflect an established small-sized studio’s photography pricing.

Fixed Cost of Doing Business

Fixed costs, such as equipment maintenance and studio rental, remain constant regardless of the number of photography sessions you conduct.

Variable Cost of Doing Business

Conversely, variable costs, like the cost of travel for each photo shoot, fluctuate based on one’s activity level. 

2. Determine your cost of living

Who likes to work for free, right? Well, if you charge the CODB (cost of doing business) rate, you’re doing just that—simply covering your business expenses and pocketing nothing for your living. Let’s factor in your cost of living (COL) to see what you actually need to earn.

Below is a generalized calculator to cover a basic family lifestyle. Although these numbers align well with the most recent averages of the Consumer Expenditure Survey from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), some of you will have different or additional expenses. To adapt to your lifestyle and needs, set the inapplicable fields to zero, use the slider to adjust the others, and enter a number into the Miscellaneous category.

3. Figure out your work and billable hours

Next, let’s talk about hours, this will be a simple math.

We’ll use a standard 40-hour week approach (5 days a week multiplied by 8 hours per day, although running your own business takes more days and hours. With 52 weeks in a year, that’s 2,080 “work hours“.

Not all those hours will be directly shoot-related. Let’s say a quarter will be set aside for general business needs like marketing, learning, blogging, etc. The remaining three quarters can be referred to as “billable hours“.

Next, there will be seasonal downtimes when there’s no work. It is best to refocus on business during such periods, like when we made a massive move to our new CRM system that now runs the business on steroids (we ought to talk separately about how it changed everything in another article). However, some may opt for quality family time, increasing the value of the remaining hours.

Lastly, set aside your vacation time, personal days, sick days, and possibly travel to expos and professional conferences.

4. Work out hourly rates to cover your costs and living

This is where photogs and clients clash. Someone would call a photog and say: “I only need a few pictures, how much do you charge for just an hour of your time snapping?”

Preconditioned, some struggling photogs would think: “Hmm, my personal trainer gets $35/hr, same as Joe the electrician. $50/hr would sound like a lot to them… I’ll still go with it, I’m an artist.”

Using Calculator 1 above will set you on the right path. Taking note of the calculated hourly rates based on your CODB, you would now think: “Oh, it needs to be at least $90/hr and $200/hr to ensure I’m covered for living expenses, too. Got it, I’ll try.” 

Well, you’re not quite there yet.

5. Evaluate the actual number of hours doing a job

The problem is that both the trainer and electrician mentioned above spend an hour with you and are done. There is little prep or follow-up.

You, if you’re a craftsperson, will spend double the time consulting and preparing your client for the shoot and then at least triple the shoot time finishing your craft art, which will accrue its value not just for their lifetime but for at least 2-3 generations. The following must etch into your cost of doing business:

• initial client prospecting, consultations, and shoot preparation
• travel time to/from the shoot location (if on location)
• equipment setup and breakdown
• the time it takes to wait for a client (we often wait 10-30 mins)
• photo culling and editing (this usually doubles or triples our shoot time)
• post-shoot in-person sale or online gallery preparation
• print production and delivery coordination

That “one hour of your time snapping pictures” means at least 4 to 5 hours of a photographer’s time—say 4 hours. With your $200 “smart” quote for that job, your hourly rate drops to $50/hr. Not only will you not cover any living expenses, you will also run a losing business, soon failing it miserably.

6. Calculate rock-bottom and make-a-living quotes

That’s where the final Calculator 3 kicks in. It lets you process all the data and aspects covered in this article. Unlike Calculator 1, it has a more practical and granular per-job approach.

• Estimates your work time throughout the year.
• Accounts for all of your job-related billable hours to calculate the base CODB rate (i.e., $70,000 / 1,152 hrs = $334).
• Determines the COL rate based not on the same billable hours but overall work hours because those are the hours spent to make a living, whether shooting, editing, or marketing (i.e., $85,000 / 1,856 hrs = $252).
• The combination of the two is your objective quote for the given job.

You can also see how the number of work hours you’re willing or able to put in affects the price. If you’re a budding photographer willing to put in extra effort and hours to grow your business, your lower price will be mathematically justified to stay in business! If you pull this off as a second job or have limited hours to share with other responsibilities, the calculators will help you figure that higher rate, too.

7. Adjust the final per-job quote if needed

There is one last point on subjectivity. These numbers know little about your mastery, uniqueness, or other life factors. You can’t use the same calculation as a boilerplate for all shoots. Some are special and can pull the price up or down, when pure numbers of cost of doing business do not work.

The subjective factor slider of the calculator above gives a rough idea of such cases:

• 0: charity or goodwill shoots for family members, which we can shoot for free (likely at a loss) 
• 0.5: for those special friends and distant family, or even loyal clients whom you want to treat
• 1: standard rate
• 1.5: for shoots that bear a higher emotional or artistic value, as wedding and boudoir photography differ from headshots and family portraits
• 2: shoots that require extraordinary resources and skills and produce rare masterpieces, like our underwater photography 

This scale is an approximation, of course, with various points in between and beyond.

“Wait, so which one should I use?”

There are several approaches to calculating hourly rates across the “schools” so the numbers differ. We combined several to make a consolidated sense.

1. One simply covers the costs based on your average number of weekly shoot hours, the hours your clients count. That’s a Zero Profit one in Calculator 1.
2. If you add your living expenses, you get Make a Living rate in Calculator 1.
3. The third accounts for all pre- and post-shoot billable hours, projecting the annual costs over them to determine CODB for a Given Job rate in Calculator 3.
4. Again, counting all hours, the cost of living projects on all the work hours (billable and not) for the COL for a Given Job rate in Calculator 3.
5. Combining #3 and #4 gives an idea of the final Objective Quote in Calculator 3.
6. Foreseeing the notions that “My art is more than the numbers” or “I can’t charge my niece these numbers”, we added a Subjective Quote in Calculator 3, which is an exemplary factor to adjust the quote up or down.

So, we believe going with the Objective Quote in Calculator 3 is the best way, with an optional personal adjustment.

Conclusion

Every photographer operates with a unique business model, whether specializing in wedding photography, portrait sessions, or commercial work. Your pricing strategies should align with your business model to ensure you know how much to charge for the type of photography you offer. By understanding your cost of doing business and customizing your pricing to fit your niche and target clientele, you can position yourself competitively in the market while maintaining a reasonable pricing structure that reflects the value you provide.

Setting reasonable prices as a skilled photographer involves various strategies, including accounting for living expenses and knowing the cost of running your business to ensure you cover your expenses while remaining competitive in the market. 

The generic CODB worksheets have been described in business guides and books for decades. We’ve also seen them on paper, in software, in Excel, and online. However, not as many are designed specifically for photographers, and we haven’t come across such a 3-calculator-based online tool for our peers. So, we hope these Cost of Doing Business for Photographers calculators were helpful. We also believe they demonstrate how reasonable prices actually form, no matter how high they seem to an unprepared client. 

Did we miss anything? Did they help you? Are you able to charge these calculated rates? Feel free to share your feedback, thoughts, or user cases. We’d love to see if there is a practical way for you to fine-tune these CODB calculators. Here’s to your success, joy, and rewarding adventure!