For artists

How to price your art without losing money on every piece.

You quoted a friend fifteen dollars for a pet portrait, spent two hours on it, and were four dollars down by the time the paper, the ink, and the sleeve were paid for. Nobody was taking advantage of you. The number simply never had a chance to be right.

Priscale prices the piece the way a business would, so the friendly price is still a price you can afford to say.

A year of friend prices

Pieces sold at friend prices: 38
Lost on each one: −$4.00
What the year cost you: −$152.00

Kindness is free. The paper and the ink are not.

What a piece costs

Charge your buddy $15 and you lose $4 making it.

Two hours on a pet portrait, a sheet of good paper, the ink, the sleeve you mailed it in. Priced by feel, that is a fifteen-dollar favor. Priced properly, your studio time alone is $16.00 of it, so the favor cost you four dollars for the privilege of doing the work.

On the Freelancer plan, Priscale starts where the arithmetic starts: your rent, your subscriptions, your supplies, your equipment, and the hours you can genuinely spend making things, divided into an hourly rate for your own time. Once your hours have a price, so does every piece, and “what should I charge?” stops being a feeling.

How your hourly rate is calculated

Pet portrait for a friend

What you charged: $15.00
Your time · 2 h @ $8.00/h: $16.00
Paper, ink & sleeve: $3.00
What the piece cost you: $19.00
What you kept: −$4.00

Pricing Spectrum

A price for the person actually asking.

You do not charge the friend of a friend what you charge the agency with a two-week deadline, and you should not have to invent that difference on the spot. Priscale lays out about 30 candidate prices spanning what the piece costs you and what this kind of commission goes for, each one flagged loss, break-even, or profit.

Then it flags the prices that fit the situation you pick — trying to grow, a client taking lots of bids, a difficult client, a dry spell. The recommendations come out of a hand-coded algorithm, not AI, so the same inputs give the same spectrum every time and every candidate traces back to numbers you entered yourself.

How the pricing spectrum works

Illustration commission · what to say

Friend of a friend: $205.00 +$25.00
Repeat collector: $235.00 +$55.00
Standard commission: $265.00 +$85.00
Rush, two-week turnaround: $310.00 +$130.00

The pricing spectrum for a hand-lettered sign, recommending prices near market value for the situation picked

Transparent estimates

Write the price down so you never have to defend it.

Saying a number out loud is the hardest part of the job, and it gets harder when the number is one round figure with nothing behind it. Priscale writes the commission out the way you built it: the studio hours, the materials and printing, the platform and shipping fees, with your profit already inside the price instead of tacked on at the bottom where it looks negotiable.

Send it as a secure link, name the person whose approval actually counts, and see when it was opened. When someone asks for a smaller version or a faster turnaround, you move a line and watch the total move with it, instead of discounting in your head and hoping it still clears what the piece costs you.

Your overhead is already there. It just is not in the price yet.

Rent on the space, the tablet, the software subscriptions, the paint, the shipping supplies, the booth fee at the fair. None of it disappears because a piece sold cheap. On the Freelancer plan, Priscale divides a year of it by the hours you can genuinely spend making things and hands you the rate your time has to earn for the studio to stand still.

No black boxes and no AI guessing on your behalf: it is your own arithmetic, kept somewhere other than the back of your head.

Per year · one studio

Studio expenses & supplies: $9,984.00
Hours you can actually make in: 1,248
Your hourly rate: $8.00/h

Other trades

Not just artists.

Contractors, landscapers, software developers, and anyone else who names a price before the work starts run into the same arithmetic from a different direction.

See who Priscale is for