Where Math Meets Market: How to Price Your Work as a Creative

Having just been a guest speaker in the UAF Pen & Ink class, a handful of questions from the students were about pricing. Considering I encounter this a lot in other conversations with creatives and makers, it felt like a reasonable time to sit down and dive in.

Take your time to digest this information and apply the formulas to your own practice. Return to this article as much as you need to. While everything in here is actionable, it's not meant to be adopted in one go.

The first thing is to know what your living wage is. This is the wage you need to pay yourself in order to live and survive. This starts with figuring out your Monthly Living Expenses (MLE) by adding up things like rent/mortgage, utilities, groceries and gas, insurance, childcare, etc.. (If you share expenses with a partner, you can divide accordingly.)

Next, add in your Monthly Business Expenses (MBE), because running a business is not free; add up things like software subscriptions, materials/supplies, website hosting, marketing, studio or office rental, taxes, etc.

Adding the MLE and the MBE equates your real monthly income goal, or the money your business actually needs to bring in.

MLE + MBE = Monthly Income Goal

Next, you need to calculate your actual Billable Hours (BH) per month. Hard truth, you are NOT working 40 billable hours per week, and this is where most small business owners underprice themselves. Things like admin time, responding to emails, marketing, packaging and fulfillment, and (because you're human) creative burnout days all eat into your time. For example, I manage 12-15 billable hours each week, or 48-60 per month. You need to figure out realistically how many hours you are providing a service or creating something to sell, which are your "billable" hours.

Monthly Income Goal ÷ Billable Hours = Base Hour Rate

Important, your Base Hour Rate, is your 'do not go below this number' rate.

Optional but highly recommended, ensure a profit and sustain your future growth by adding 10-30% to your Base Hour Rate.

As an example, if my monthly income goal is $3,000 in a dual-income household, and I manage only 48 billable hours in a month, my Base Hourly Rate would be $62.50. Adding a 10% buffer ($6.25) brings that to $68.75.

---

Turning Your Hourly Rate into Project Pricing

Once you have your base hourly rate, you can translate that into pricing for flat rate projects.

Here, the first step is to estimate the amount of hours your projects take on average.

Looking at my past work, I generally spend 22 hours on a single logo project. I will call that my Estimated Project Hours (EPH).

Next, multiply your EPH by your base rate to give you the bare minimum price for your project flat rate. Using the Base Hourly Rate we calculated above, our starting flat rate would be $1,375.

Build in a buffer of 10–30% to account for revisions, scope creep, communication time, and the creative problem-solving that can’t be rushed.

A 10% contingency would be $137.50, totaling the flat rate to $1,512.50. You can round this up or down to look pretty to a client, but there’s also something psychological about seeing a raw number like that for a client – it looks legit and doesn’t feel arbitrary.

This is also a great way to assess if a project is worth your time, or if you need to say NO.

So, How Many Projects Do You Actually Need?

You know your monthly income goal, and you know your flat project price. Now you can figure out your monthly workload. Using the examples above, if the monthly goal is $3,000 and the average project is $1,500, you would need 2 projects per month.

Why this Matters

If your prices are too low, the math doesn’t work. You’re either taking on too many projects and reaching burn out on the regular. Or you don’t make enough to sustain your life. Neither is a business.

---

Where Math Really Meets the Market

You can also apply your base wage to your labor costs if you’re producing handmade goods. The standard formula to start with is:

Materials + Labor (hourly wage x time) = Base Cost

If you intend to offer items at wholesale, then:

Wholesale = Base x 2 – this ensures you get a profit

which means:

Retail = Wholesale x 2 – you should price your direct-to-consumer retail price here (if you wholesale), to ensure your pricing is aligned with your stockists.

This works in theory because it covers your costs, pays you for your time, and leaves margin for wholesale.

I also know, from experience, that this pricing formula breaks down (and feels awful) if the retail price ends up feeling, well, astronomical. For example, if you’ve calculated your hourly wage to be $62.50, and you invest 4 hours into making something by hand, and your materials cost you $70…

You’re staring at a product with a base price of $300+, and likely thinking, “there’s no way anyone will pay that.”

So you start to undercut yourself.

But the solution is not to charge less and suffer.

So, how do you price handmade goods?

One option is to separate “art” from “production”, offering heirloom, slow-made pieces priced fully (yes, at the $250+ pricetag), but also offer production-friendly items which are designed to be more efficient.

Another idea is to design for your price point. Think, what can I create that fits a $75 / $125 / $200 price point? That might look like simplifying the design, reducing the time per piece, batching production, or choosing different materials.

I love the idea of increasing the perceived value, so that the price feels aligned. If you are selling a $250 piece, it has to FEEL like a $250 piece. It’s not just the item, it’s story telling, presentation (packaging will make the difference here), professional level photography, and positioning it as art, and not just a product.

I also love building a business across different price points. Not everyone can buy the $250 piece, but allow your audience to self-select based on their budget. You don’t have to shrink your prices to meet them. Instead, offer prodcuts in a $20-$40 range, a $50-$150 range, and then the premium $250 range. If you build a ladder of offerings, it gets people to your booth, builds your brand, and leads to higher-ticket sales.

You don’t need to make your work cheaper. You need to make your business smarter. If everything you sell is underpriced, you’re not only undervaluing yourself as a maker (and also undervaluing all your fellow creatives), you’re likely f*cking exhausted from the hamster wheel of the hustle.

Ultimately, the goal is to build a body of work and a product line that actually supports your life. Sometimes that means adjusting what you make, not just what you charge.

---

Unpopular Opinion: Credit Card Fees Are the Cost of Doing Business

Whether you’re invoicing clients or selling at markets, you’re likely getting hit with credit card processing fees.

Unpopular opinion: those fees are the cost of doing business.

If you don’t want to absorb them, you can shift to cash-only or clearly communicate a preference for cash. But I don’t love the trend of passing those fees directly to your customer. Accepting credit cards is a choice, and the fees that come with it are part of doing business -- not something to pass on to your client or customer.