Free tool
Your drive and your setup are paid for once, for the whole day. Your shooting and editing are paid for per client. That means the same price can be a great day or a bad one, depending entirely on how many slots you fill.
The last question is the one that matters most, so be honest rather than hopeful. Use the number you actually filled last time.
Optimism here is the mistake this tool exists to correct, so this starts below the number you are offering. You will see both on the result.
You drive there once and you set up once, whether two people show up or twelve. This is the block of cost that every filled slot has to help carry.
The day costs you before a single client arrives, plus out of pocket.
This is the part that repeats. Every booking adds all of it again, which is why the shoot is usually the smallest piece.
Each client is 0 of your time, and only of that is the part with a camera in your hand.
Two things come out before the rest is yours. Then tell us what you want an hour of your time to be worth, and we will hold the whole day up against it.
30% is a reasonable starting point: 15.3% self-employment tax plus a typical federal and state bracket. This applies to the profit of the day, not the revenue.
The standard card rate is 2.9% plus 30 cents. Change it if yours differs.
Take home, after tax and fees, for every hour the day costs you. This sets the line on your curve and the minimum price we suggest.
Enter your email to see your personalized breakdown. We'll also send you a copy to reference later.
This is an estimate for planning purposes, not tax or financial advice. Your real numbers depend on your own costs and your own tax situation.
Nothing changes across this line except how many slots filled. That is the whole point: your rate is mostly a fill rate question, not a pricing question.
Move this and everything below moves with it, including the line on your curve.
0
bookings to clear your target rate
Cash break-even is 0.
$0
The left column is paid once for the day. The right column is paid again for every person who books. This is the asymmetry the curve comes from.
The whole day
Every client
Your price is set. Your drive is your drive. The variable left is how many people take a slot, and slots fill faster when clients can grab one themselves instead of waiting on a reply in your DMs. DandyLight builds every time slot for the day, then hands you one booking page to share.
The free plan includes one mini session for life, which is enough to run a real mini day before deciding anything. During your 14 day trial there is no cap at all. Full access, no credit card.
Let clients book their own slotNow wondering about the rest of your pricing? Run your full session prices
Most pricing advice treats a session as a fixed thing: it costs you a certain number of hours, so you charge a certain amount. Mini sessions break that model, and it is the reason so many photographers finish a mini day feeling like the math did not work even though nothing went wrong.
The drive to the location, the setup, and the teardown are paid once for the whole day. The shooting, culling, editing, and gallery delivery are paid again for every client. So a half full day does not cost you half as much. It costs you almost the same fixed block of hours, divided among fewer people. Your real hourly rate ends up depending far more on fill rate than on price.
Work backwards from the hourly rate you want rather than from what other photographers post. Add up the hours the whole day costs you, including the drive and the setup you pay for once, plus the shooting, editing, and delivery you pay for per client. Then price so that the number of slots you realistically fill clears your target rate. Most fall minis land between $150 and $400, but the same price can be a good day or a bad one depending entirely on fill rate, which is what this calculator shows you.
Offer enough that the fixed cost of the day gets spread thin, but not more than you can genuinely fill. Six to twelve slots in a single block is typical. The trap is offering fourteen and filling seven, because the drive and setup then get carried by half as many people. If you are not sure you can fill a long day, a shorter one that sells out pays better per hour than a long one that does not.
Fifteen to twenty minutes of shooting is the standard, with a five to ten minute buffer between slots so one late family does not push the whole day. Remember that the session length is only part of what each client costs you. Culling, editing, and delivering the gallery usually take longer than the shoot itself, so a twenty minute session is closer to an hour of real work.
They can be very profitable, and they can also quietly pay less than a single full session. The difference is fill rate. Travel and setup are paid once for the whole day no matter how many people come, so every empty slot makes the filled ones carry more of that cost. A full day of minis often beats a full session on an hourly basis. A half empty day of minis usually does not.
Eight to fifteen edited images is the usual range for a fifteen to twenty minute session. Delivering more is the most common way photographers erode their own mini session profit, because editing time is a per client cost that scales with every extra image. If you want to raise the value of the offer, it is almost always better to add something that does not cost you editing hours than to add ten more photos.