← Photo Package Add-On Pricing Calculator
Most add-on prices come from one place: what other studios in the area charge for the same thing. That number answers whether a client will accept the price. It says nothing about whether the price covers this studio's own culling and editing hours, gear wear, and any subcontractor or physical-goods cost — and two studios charging the identical $300 for an extra hour can end up with completely different profit on it.
Comparing to what other studios charge answers "will a client pay this?" — a real and necessary question, because a price nobody accepts never gets booked at all. It has no visibility into this studio's own numbers: how many culling and editing hours this specific add-on generates, whether a second shooter or an album vendor gets paid out of it, or what gear wear it puts on a body or lens.
This calculator answers a different question: "does this studio actually profit at this price, after its own time and costs?" It takes the photographer's target hourly rate, the extra shoot/cull/edit hours the add-on generates, any second-shooter or physical-goods cost, and a gear wear allowance, and returns net profit and effective hourly rate for the price being considered — then lets several add-on options be ranked by effective hourly rate instead of headline price.
Neither replaces the other. A price that clears both — competitive against comparable studios and profitable on this studio's own cost structure — is the one actually worth offering.
| Question | Where to answer it |
|---|---|
| Will a client accept this add-on's price? | Checking what comparable studios charge — this calculator has no data on that. |
| Does this studio actually profit at that price? | This calculator — free, private, from your own numbers. |
| Which of two or three add-on options pays best per hour of my own time? | This calculator's comparison table, ranked by effective hourly rate. |
| Is my pricing data uploaded anywhere? | No. Everything runs in your browser; your figures stay on this device. |
This tool needs no account and no sign-in: it is a static page, the arithmetic runs in your browser, and nothing you type is uploaded anywhere.
It tells a client the price is competitive, which matters for booking the add-on at all. It says nothing about whether that price covers this studio's own culling and editing hours, gear wear, and any subcontractor or physical-goods cost -- two studios can charge the same $300 for an extra hour and have completely different profit on it, because their own cull/edit time and costs differ. Competitive pricing and profitable pricing are two different questions, and only one of them is answered by checking what other studios charge.
No -- it is still useful for setting a price a client will accept. The point is that it is only half the picture. Checking a competitor's price answers "will a client pay this?"; running the same price through this calculator answers "does this studio actually profit at this price, after its own time and costs?" Both questions matter, and only one of them needs a competitor's number at all.
The culling and editing hours an add-on generates, most often. A second shooter's take or an extra hour of coverage routinely produces one to two times the shoot hours in post-production time, and that time never appears on an invoice the way a subcontractor payment does -- so a price that looks competitive against another studio's rate card can still pay the photographer less than their own target hourly rate once those hours are counted.
No, and it is not built to. This calculator only prices this studio's own add-on economics from numbers supplied to it -- it has no data on what any other studio charges, and does not attempt to estimate a competitive market rate. Checking comparable studios' pricing is still worth doing; it just answers a different question than this calculator does.
Open the add-on pricing calculator, or see a worked example: is a second shooter worth it?