Most photo booth owners set their first price by looking at what others charge and coming in a little under. It feels safe, but it tells you nothing about whether a booking makes you money. A better starting point is your own costs, worked out per event, with a margin on top. Once you know that floor, you can decide how far above it your market will let you go.
Start with what one event costs you
Write down everything that leaves your pocket because a particular booking happened. For most booths that means:
- prints, paper and ink, or the cost per print of your media kit
- props and backdrops that wear out or go missing
- fuel, tolls and parking for the trip there and back
- wages for anyone you send, including the hours they spend traveling
- card fees from your payment provider
- any gallery, sharing or software fees you pay per event
Then add a share of the costs you pay whether you are booked or not: insurance, the van, storage, your website, advertising, phone and accounts. Total those for a year, divide by the number of events you realistically expect, and add the result to each booking. If you expect 60 events and your fixed costs come to 9,000 a year, each event carries 150 before you have printed a single strip.
Count the hours the customer never sees
A three-hour rental is rarely three hours of work. There is loading the van, driving, setting up and testing, the rental itself, packing down, driving home and unloading. Then there is the admin: replying to the inquiry, sending the quote, designing the print template and answering questions in the week before. Add it all up and a three-hour rental can easily take eight or nine hours of someone's time.
Put a value on those hours, including your own. If you do the work yourself and leave your time out, the price looks healthy right up to the day you need to pay someone else to do it.
Allow for wear and replacement
Cameras, printers, screens and lighting all have a working life. As an example, a printer that costs 1,200 and lasts around 300 events adds about 4 to every booking. Do the same rough sum for the camera, the booth shell and anything else you will one day have to replace. These amounts are small per event, which is exactly why they get forgotten, and why the replacement always seems to arrive at a bad moment.
Add a margin you can live on
Costs plus hours tells you where a booking pays for itself. Profit sits on top of that. The margin is what carries you through the quiet months, covers the canceled date you cannot resell and pays for new equipment. Decide what you want each booking to earn above its costs, and treat it as part of the price rather than whatever happens to be left over.
A worked example
Say, as an example with round invented figures, a three-hour wedding booking looks like this:
- prints and consumables: 60
- travel: 40
- one attendant for nine hours at 15 an hour: 135
- share of fixed costs: 150
- wear on equipment: 15
That comes to 400 before any profit. Add the margin you want, say 200, and the booking needs to be priced at about 600. If your local market will only pay 450 for that package, you know before you start that something has to change: fewer staff hours, cheaper consumables, a shorter travel radius or a different kind of customer.
Build packages, not a long list of extras
Most customers find it easier to choose between three clear options than to build their own from a menu. A common shape is a basic package, a middle one with the things most people want anyway (more hours, a guest book, digital sharing) and a fuller one with the extras. Price the middle package so it is the obvious choice, and check that every package covers its own costs at your chosen margin.
Extra hours deserve some thought. The first hour carries the travel, setup and pack-down, so each additional hour costs you far less. You can price extra hours below your average hourly rate and still do well from them.
Charge more for the dates everyone wants
Saturdays in wedding season and the weeks before Christmas fill first. A booth can only be in one place at a time, so a peak date sold cheaply is a date you cannot sell to anyone else. Some operators keep a standard price for midweek and quiet months and a higher one for peak dates. Others set the higher price as standard and offer an off-peak discount, which can feel friendlier to customers. Whichever you choose, write the rule down so every quote follows it.
Check your price every year
Paper, fuel and wages all move. Once a year, rerun the sums with real figures from the past twelve months: how many events you did, what consumables actually cost and how long jobs really took. Adjust your packages for new bookings, and honour the prices you have already agreed.
Doing this in Occanovo
To try your own numbers, the free photo booth pricing calculator shows what you really earn from each booking. In Occanovo you set up your packages once, and date and season prices are applied for you when you build a proposal. The photo booth page shows how a booking goes from inquiry to the booth on the van.