So you are following my blog for a while now. So you read me about micro-stock, about standing you ground when it comes to negotiate. And now you want to start charging a fair price too. So where do you start? How much do you charge? How much is a fair price?

It all depends of the usage the client wants.

You see, you don’t actually sell a photo. You sell a license to use a photo. That’s pretty different, and it is pretty important because you can resell the same photo over and over again to different clients. Or even to the same client when the license is expired.

The standard for stock pricing is fotoquote, from Cradoc fotpsoftware. From a series of drop down menus, you tell the software the usage your client wants, and it tells you back the price you should charge.

For instance, If a company wanted to buy me a picture for the front page of their annual report, up to 10000 copies in Canada, the price would be 1300$

A 1/4 of a page editorial use in a consumer magazine that sells up to 100000 copies would fetch 300$ for the same image. Slightly more that what Time magazine paid recently for their cover…

Still the same photo, but this time for advertisement on a billboard , more than a hundred of them, for a 3 months campaign? That would get me 2800$

And if the same client would also use the image in a magazine advertisement, that would be on top of what he paid for the billboards.