How to Price Photo Delivery Into Your Packages

Forget the brand names for a moment. Strip any gallery platform down and its bill has one of three shapes, and you can tell which one you are looking at by asking a single question: what makes this number go up next month.

None of these shapes is dishonest and none of them is automatically cheaper. A percentage is genuinely the right deal for a studio that sells very little, because a percentage of nothing is nothing. A per-job charge is honest about the fact that serving a gallery costs the platform something.

The point is narrower than cheap versus expensive. The shape tells you where the cost goes in your pricing, and a cost filed in the wrong place quietly distorts every package you build on top of it.

Here is the flat shape run against volume, using the only price on this page we can state as fact. The annual plan is 100 $/year, which is 8.33 $ a month. The monthly plan is 10 $/month, which is 120 $ over a year.

The 1,200 $ package is illustrative and you should substitute your own average. The column that matters is the second one, and the shape of it is the whole argument. Under a flat line, delivery gets cheaper per job every time you book work, and it gets cheaper without you negotiating anything.

Run the same table for a per-job shape and the second column is a flat line instead. Twenty jobs cost twenty times one job, every year, forever. Run it for a percentage and the second column rises with your average sale. That is the difference the shape makes, and it is worth more than the headline price on any of the three.

One honest caveat about the word flat. A flat line stays flat because it is fenced. Ours is fenced at 1,000 photos per gallery, 250 GB of proofs per paid account and 100 GB of standing full-resolution ZIPs. Uploads are JPG and PNG, with no RAW and no video, which is the trade that keeps the price from needing tiers. If your delivery habits do not fit inside that fence, the flat line is not flat for you and you should say so before you plan pricing around it.

The instinct, once you know a cost, is to recover it from the client who caused it. With a fixed cost that instinct backfires, and the table above shows why.

At twenty jobs a year the honest per-client delivery cost is 5.00 $. To recover it you put a 5.00 $ line on an invoice. That line now has to be named, explained when someone asks, and defended when someone pushes back. Card processing takes a slice of it on the way in. The client reads a professional invoice and finds a five dollar charge for sending them their own photos.

Count what you actually bought. A hundred dollars a year of recovered cost, against a line item that makes a 1,200 $ package feel nickel-and-dimed. You can lose more than that on one booking that hesitates.

There are three sane ways to handle a fixed delivery cost, and none of them is a line item.

Absorb it. Put it in overhead beside your domain, your insurance and your editing software. Overhead is already recovered by your package prices, and the reason you set those prices where they are.

Fold it into the price once. If you genuinely want it covered explicitly, raise your package by the annual figure divided by your expected bookings, then round to something that looks like a price. Five dollars on a 1,200 $ package rounds to nothing.

Make it part of what you sell. A branded gallery under your own subdomain, a client who never makes an account, one-click downloads and a page that carries your logo and no platform's. That is presentation, and presentation is already priced into what you charge. Delivery is not an add-on to the job. It is the last thing the client sees, and it is the part they screenshot.

Charge for delivery as a separate line only when it genuinely varies. Rush turnaround, an extra event day, a second full gallery for a different family, a physical drive you had to buy. Those move with the job, so they price with the job.

Four inputs, and you can do this on the back of a call sheet. The answer is a single figure you either absorb or fold in.

Do the same four steps for any platform you are comparing against, and do them for the volume you actually expect rather than the volume you would like. A per-job or per-band bill compares badly at high volume and well at low volume. A percentage compares badly exactly when you are winning.

If you want that comparison worked out rather than described, the per-gallery versus subscription comparison does the break-even arithmetic, and how much Pixieset actually costs per month carries dated figures from a named competitor. Those two pages are where the numbers live. This one is about where the number goes once you have it.

Photographers conflate these two and it costs them more than the subscription ever will. Cost is what you pay out. Timing is when the client pays in. A gallery affects the second one far more than the first.

A gallery can carry your own payment link, so a "Pay your invoice" button sits beside the download. Downloads can be switched off until you have been paid. That switch is manual. Nothing unlocks by itself, there is no payment webhook, and you flip it once the money lands.

That is worth describing accurately because it changes how you write your packages. If the balance is due on delivery, the gallery is the moment it becomes due, and the client is looking at their photos while they pay. That is the best collection position you will ever be in. It has nothing to do with the delivery cost per job and everything to do with your cash position in March.

One more timing point. Full-resolution files are a handoff here, not a library. The studio uploads its own full-resolution ZIP and the client's link is live for 3 days per handoff, re-uploadable any time. Hosted proof galleries stay live for as long as the account exists. If your packages promise clients permanent access to their master files, write the promise you can actually keep, on whatever platform you use.

Two readers should close this page and do something else, and pretending otherwise would make the rest of it less trustworthy.

If you deliver three or four jobs a year, a paid plan is hard to justify. The first table says why: at four jobs the cost per job is 25.00 $, which is the point where a fixed cost starts behaving like a variable one because the denominator is too small. A free tier somewhere, or a plain shared folder link, may genuinely be the right answer. Our first gallery is free, so you can see whether a branded handoff changes how clients respond before you decide it is worth a hundred dollars a year. If it does not, do not pay.

If most of your income comes from print sales, you are shopping in the wrong category. We have no print store and take no commission, because there is nothing to take a commission on. A studio whose revenue runs through prints and albums should be comparing commission structures, print lab integrations and sales automation, and those comparisons are won and lost on percentages rather than on subscription prices. A flat delivery tool is the right purchase for a studio that sells the shoot. It is the wrong purchase for a studio that sells the wall.

Everyone else is in the third case, which is the ordinary one. You charge a session or package fee, digital files are included in it, and delivery is a cost of doing business rather than a product line. For you the whole question resolves to one sentence: put the fixed line in overhead, keep the variable extras in the job price, and stop building an invoice line out of five dollars.

If you want the workflow those numbers are supposed to serve, the photo delivery guide covers the handoff itself rather than its price.

This page states no competitor price, storage figure, commission rate or plan detail, on purpose. Those numbers change, and a dated figure belongs on a page that carries its own fetch date. Two of our pages do that work: the per-gallery versus subscription comparison and the Pixieset cost page, both linked above.

The clientgallery.io figures used here were checked against the running product on 12 September 2026: one plan at 10 $/month or 100 $/year, the first gallery free, unlimited galleries and clients under fair use, no per-gallery fee and no commission, fair-use ceilings of 1,000 photos per gallery, 250 GB of proofs per paid account and 100 GB of standing full-resolution ZIPs, full-resolution links live 3 days per handoff, hosted proof galleries live for as long as the account exists, uploads limited to JPG and PNG, and a studio-supplied payment link with a manual download switch. The 1,200 $ package, the job counts and every per-job figure derived from them are arithmetic on illustrative inputs, not measurements of any real business.