Your packages
Your business
Coverage hours are the hours you shoot. Travel, client time and editing hours are added to every job; editing is coverage hours times your editing ratio. Per-job costs are things like a second shooter, album or prints. Overhead is spread over the hours you can work, not the hours you fill. Jobs per month are converted to a weekly mix using your weeks per year.
Add your packages, then click Calculate.
Result
Profit per hour worked by package
| Package | Price | Hours worked | Editing share | Headline / coverage hour | Profit / hour worked | Price for target | Vs target |
|---|
Your own clients, lead marketplace or studio associate
| Model | Per week | Per hour worked | Per year |
|---|
Raise break-even: what a price raise can cost
| Raise | Extra per week | Jobs you can lose first | Weekly change at your retention |
|---|
How it is calculated
Hours worked: coverage hours + travel + client time + (coverage hours × editing ratio). Overhead per hour: monthly overhead × 12 ÷ (hours per week × weeks per year). Contribution: price × (1 − card fee) − job costs − gear wear. Profit per hour worked: contribution ÷ hours worked − overhead per hour. Price for target: ((target + overhead per hour) × hours worked + job costs + gear wear) ÷ (1 − card fee). Lead marketplace: price × (1 − lead fee), then the same costs and overhead. Studio associate: your hourly rate × coverage hours, less gear wear and the share of overhead you still carry; hours worked are coverage plus travel only.
Not modelled: payroll and self-employment tax, sales tax, retainers and cancellations, album and print sales beyond the per-job cost you enter, seasonality, the extra bookings a marketplace or studio may bring, and local market prices. Unverified: tested on hand-calculated examples, not against a real photographer's books.
Common questions
How much should a wedding photographer charge?
Work backwards from the hours, and count the editing. Add coverage hours to travel, client time (consultation, planning, delivery) and culling and editing time, multiply by the hourly take-home you want plus your overhead per working hour, add the job's own costs and gear wear, then divide by one minus your card fee. That is the price floor. This tool does the arithmetic from your own figures; it does not know what weddings cost in your town.
Why does editing time matter so much?
An eight-hour wedding is often thirty hours of work. Culling and editing a day of photos commonly takes two to three times the coverage hours, so a headline rate per coverage hour overstates what you earn per hour worked by a wide margin. Enter your own editing ratio and the table shows both numbers side by side.
What should go in monthly overhead?
Gear replacement set-aside, insurance, software and gallery subscriptions, cloud storage and backups, website, vehicle costs not tied to one job, and marketing. Overhead is spread over the hours you can work each week, not the hours you happen to fill.
Is a lead marketplace or shooting for a studio worth it?
The tool replays your monthly mix three ways: your own clients, a lead marketplace that takes a percentage of each booked job, and shooting as an associate for a studio at a flat rate per coverage hour with no editing. It compares weekly income and income per hour worked. It does not value the extra bookings a marketplace or studio might send you.
Is a price raise worth the clients I might lose?
The raise table shows the share of jobs you could lose before a price rise costs you money. Overhead does not shrink when clients leave, so the break-even loss is the extra revenue divided by the new total contribution.
Is my information uploaded?
No. The calculation runs in your browser from figures you type, nothing is sent to a server, there are no accounts, and it works offline after the page loads. No client or event details are needed or accepted.