I grew up watching my parents run a photography business that should have thrived. The talent was there. The clients loved them. But the pricing? It never moved. Year after year, they charged roughly the same rates while costs crept up, and I watched the margins quietly disappear. They weren’t bad at business. They were just pricing from the gut instead of from the numbers. That pattern scared itself into my memory, and it’s a big part of why, when I finally opened my own studio, I became almost obsessive about knowing exactly what every session needs to earn.

So when I came across this episode from The Portrait System, it hit close to home. Not because it introduced something I’d never heard of, but because it laid out the framework I use, clearly and in plain language, in a way I wish someone had handed me years earlier.

Pricing Is a Math Problem, Not a Feelings Problem

The core argument in this Portrait System episode is blunt: most photographers underprice because they let emotion drive the decision. They worry about scaring clients off. They look at what competitors charge and anchor to that. They feel uncomfortable talking about money, so they set prices low to avoid the conversation entirely.

The fix isn’t confidence coaching. It’s arithmetic.

The tutorial walks through three numbers you need before you can set a single price. First is your total business expenses, everything it costs to keep the studio running for a year, divided down to a monthly and then a per-session figure. Think software subscriptions, gear maintenance, insurance, marketing costs, and your own time. Second is your profit goal, the actual take-home number you want, not just revenue. Third is your cost of sales, which covers the expenses directly tied to delivering a specific job: printing, product orders, travel, packaging.

Once you have those three numbers, your minimum average sale is not a guess. It’s a result.

How to Build Your Baseline Price From Scratch

Here’s how the math works in practice. Say your monthly business expenses come out to $3,000. You want to pay yourself $5,000 a month. That’s $8,000 you need to cover before a single product is ordered. If you’re running 8 client sessions a month, you need each session to average $1,000 in sales just to break even on those two numbers. Then you layer in cost of sales. If fulfilling a typical order costs you $200 in product and delivery, your real minimum average sale climbs to $1,200.

Now you’re not guessing at a price. You’re building backward from a requirement.

The tutorial is careful to separate this from your menu pricing. Your menu can have a session fee, collections, and a la carte items at various levels. But the average sale target is the internal benchmark that tells you whether a month was profitable or just busy. Busy and profitable are not the same thing, and plenty of photographers confuse them.

Where the Numbers Actually Live in Your Business

The Portrait System episode emphasizes tracking this monthly without fail. Not quarterly, not at year-end when your accountant is asking questions. Monthly, so you can catch a slide before it becomes a problem.

The metrics to monitor are: total revenue, number of sessions, average sale per session, and total cost of goods. From those four numbers, you can calculate your actual profit margin and see exactly which months are working and which ones are lying to you. A month where you shot 12 sessions and grossed $9,000 sounds good until you realize your average sale was $750 and your break-even is $1,100.

This is the kind of thing that feels tedious until the first time it saves you from a bad quarter.

The One Place I’d Push This Further

I run these numbers exactly as described, and they work. But I’d add one layer the episode doesn’t cover explicitly: segment your average sale by client type or by how the client was acquired.

I started doing this after my husband, who thinks in spreadsheets the way I think in lighting diagrams, pointed out that my referral clients and my social media clients were performing very differently. The referral clients were hitting $1,400 average sales. The social media inquiries were averaging $850. Same studio. Same pricing menu. Completely different behavior.

That gap told me two things. My referral clients were better pre-qualified and arrived already trusting the investment. My social media funnel needed work, specifically in how I was framing value before someone ever booked. Once I started treating those as separate groups with different conversion strategies, the overall average moved up without me changing a single price on my menu.

The formula in the tutorial gives you the floor. Segmenting by source gives you the ceiling.

The Single Number That Changes Everything

If there’s one thing to take from all of this, it’s your minimum average sale. Calculate it once, correctly, and it becomes the lens through which every business decision gets filtered. Pricing a new collection? Check it against your average sale target. Considering a discount promotion? Run the math first.

Emotion has a place in the client experience. It has no place in the pricing spreadsheet.

Watch the full episode from The Portrait System for the complete walkthrough, including how they talk through real studio numbers and cost-of-sales breakdowns that are much easier to follow when you can hear them worked through out loud.