An owner running about $45,000 a month in residential work, with three full-time editors on payroll, heard the 35% figure on a call with me in September and did the arithmetic out loud before I had finished the sentence. I was not pitching him. He priced it anyway.
So just quick math here. It's $14,000. If I minus out my admin fee that I'm paying right now, that's like $2,800 a month. Yeah, you minus out your editing cost, that's like 4,500 right there. 67. And actually that doesn't include three. We have three dedicated editors, so that's like another seven grand right there. That's technically, it'd be rebating $300 doing it that way.
His quick math was a little generous to the fee. 35% of $45,000 is $15,750, not $14,000. His current cost, on his own figures, is $2,800 plus $4,500 plus about $7,000, which is $14,300. So the fee would cost him roughly $1,450 a month more than what he pays today, before anyone counts his own time. That is the honest starting point. The comparison only works once you have written your own number down.
The same owner also said what the $14,300 feels like from the inside, which the worksheet below will not capture.
I feel like every day I'm just like cutting another check for. For some odd reason, you know what I mean? Like, it. Nickels and dimes, you. It's all in. But like, I'd rather have it all go out like at the first of the month. But you never know know, you never know what you're gonna spend or what it's gonna be. Especially when it comes to photos.
The worksheet
Six lines. Fill each with your figure for a normal month, then for your slowest.
Line 1, photo editing. Your per-image rate times the images you deliver in a month. In the group this year that rate runs from 43 cents with AI on daytime work to 65 cents with human editors to 85 cents before a switch. The owner above spent about $7,000 on photos in his busiest recent month. One agency's bill went from $12,000 a month, some months $20,000, to a flat $3,000 after moving to AI.
Line 2, video editing. Either a per-edit cost or a person. On the $2,300 two-shoot day in the Facts box, video editing was $240 of the $542 that came out. The person version is a $3,000 a month editor who costs the same in a slow month.
Line 3, quality control. One agency in the group pays an outside team $550 a month to check every delivery before it goes out. Our guess at the September Pulse was that the seat disappears within a year. You are paying for it today.
