How do you determine what you should charge?

[melissa_sanchez2]

<p>I go back and forth on my pricing. How do you determine what you should charge for your sessions? Disc? Prints? </p>

[marc_david]

<p>What is the cost of running your business on a yearly basis? Divide that by the number of shooting days you intend to have within that year. Then you'll know how much you have to make per day in order to break even. Maybe this will help: http://www.nppa.org/professional_development/business_practices/cdb/cdbcalc.cfm</p>

[richardsperry]

[andy_wager1]

<p>The most basic thing you need to do is figure out your total cost of doing business, only then can you have an idea what you need to be charging overall to enable you to break even and then make a profit.<br>

a starting point is this sort of thing https://www.nppa.org/professional_development/business_practices/cdb/cdbcalc.cfm</p>

<p>Once you figure that out what you need to earn on a daily/weekly/monthly basis and you have an idea of how many sessions you may do then you can start figuring out prices.<br>

So if you work out that per day you need 500 and you are doing 2 shoots a day then you must make 250 from each.<br>

How you then break that down into sitting fee/prints/dvd etc it entirely upto you.<br>

There are off course other things such as checking out the competition, charging by the "finger in the air" method etc etc but bottom line is you absolutely need to know your CODB to get the base starting point.</p>

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