Hello

I would like to offer my photography services to other bloggers, but I am having a hard time with pricing. I would appreciate any tips. How do you calculate the cost of groceries? Do you adjust it to every recipe? Do you charge more for complicated recipes? Thank you

Hi, Rachel!

Pricing can be so tricky. Did you happen to tune into our Pricing Your Work Q&A a few weeks ago? If not, the replay is here and I’d highly recommend it.

This Forum thread is also a great resource for determining your rates.

Hope that helps get you started!

I do not know if you are still around, given that the post is a few months old, but this is fascinating to me. If I am understanding correctly, you are offering to make the recipes that others have developed for their blogs and then photograph them?

I would love to discuss this more in-depth, privately if necessary. Were you able to settle on a pricing structure? Has anyone taken you up on the offer?

Hi Rachel,

I have been doing this fulltime for a few years now and have done my fair share of mispricing so I might be able to help.
For ingredients, I used to take each recipe submitted, tally up the approximate ingredient total and tack that onto the price. Not only was this tedious, but it made the process annoying for me and clients. I now build in a set cost for the recipes. For instance in my contract, as part of the price it states that recipe ingredients up to $20 usd is included in the price of the shoot. If there are premium ingredients needed, for instance last year I got hired to shoot a prime rib roast, I told the client up front it would cost more and billed the cost of the ingredient to the client at the end.
For overall pricing it can be tricky, pricing too low to try and get clients doesn’t work, because then you land the client but you are stuck offering them your work at a price you don’t like, it’s rare to turn a low paying client into a high paying one. Make sure you are charging what you are worth, not everyone will be able to afford your services and that’s fine, you don’t want them as your client.

In order to get an idea of where to start you can use this formula : cost = approximate hourly rate + expenses x a profit multiplier.

Choose an hourly rate you think it fair for yourself l, I wouldn’t recommend going lower than $45usd/hr, that’s already low for some. Determine how many total hours it takes to get to final photos, include shopping time, research, prep, cooking, styling, photographing, clean up, editing and administrative time.

Tally up your cost, flat rate for ingredients, include a flat rate for kitchen supplies (paper towel, dish soap, salt, etc.), software costs (Lightroom, pixieset, PayPal fees, etc.), taxes of applicable. Etc.

Profit multiplier, you don’t want to work to just break even. You need to make a profit as well. I usually take the previously calculated amount and multiply it by 1.4 (40% margin) and start from there.

It might seem high, it’s not, recipe photography is a lot of work and you should get paid for it, especially considering the lifetime value a recipe post can bring to a blogger.

There are two types of recipe photographers, low cost high volume (I’ve done contracts at 50 recipes per month for lower cost, usually these are content mills), and high cost low volume (these clients that you want to work with, usually the OG owners of food blogs who care about quality over quantity). Decide which works for you, I’ve done both, the latter is much more sustainable.

This is how I got my base pricing, and I still tweak it for new clients to make sure I’m not falling behind.

Hopefully this helps!

Cheers,

Adam