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Back when I was still doing a lot of fabrication work for other artists, a friend asked me to weld a gate for his backyard. Nice guy, helped me move a block of granite once. I quoted him basically materials plus a couple hundred for my time. He was happy, I felt good about it. Five years later he wanted a matching gate for the front. Expected the same price. Then his brother heard about it. Then a neighbor. Then I'm the guy who does cheap custom ironwork for an entire neighborhood and every one of them thinks I'm gouging when I finally say no. That was the last time I did a friends-and-family price on anything. Cost me more in aggravation than I ever saved in goodwill.

A friend from the parents at my daughter's school. She knows I paint. She asked me to do a portrait of her daughter, a nice photo reference she had, the girl in a garden, good light actually. I said yes, I'd be happy to, and told her my price for a bust-length oil on linen, 40 x 50 cm, which is 1 200 €. She paused and said: "But you'll enjoy doing it." Not in a nasty way. She genuinely thought that because I would like the work, it shouldn't cost as much. As if pleasure and payment are opposites. As if a baker shouldn't charge for bread because he likes to bake. I explained that enjoying my work doesn't mean my time and materials are free, and that the years I spent learning to paint a child's face well enough that she'd want to hang it are part of what she's paying for. She said she'd think about it. She hasn't replied. I don't blame her exactly. Nobody taught her what this costs. But I'm tired of explaining that my enjoyment of the work doesn't subtract from the price, it's the whole reason the work is any good in the first place.

So I painted these two pet portraits, same size, same level of detail, both head-and-shoulders of someone's dog. A stranger commissioned me and I charged $150 and felt nervous about it. Then a friend from college asked me to do her cat and I immediately went "oh for you, $50" and then I painted the cat and it actually came out better than the stranger one. So my friend got the better painting for a third of the price and I keep thinking about that. Like I know we all do the friends and family discount thing and it's fine but it bothers me that my work isn't the same price regardless of who's asking. Or maybe it should be different because the relationship is different? My mom says I'm overthinking it because the friend will tell people and send me more work but also my mom thinks I should charge more for everything so I don't even know anymore. I guess I'm wondering where the line is between being generous with people you love and just devaluing your own time because you feel awkward asking for money from someone you actually know.

was doing a small commission for a friend of a friend. like, 3 days of work for me. i quoted them $500, thinking it was generous. they jumped on it so fast. turns out they’re a lawyer and their billable rate is $800/hr. i spent the next week feeling like a total idiot. i should have charged them $3000, minimum. now i’m stuck doing this piece for way less than it’s worth, and i feel like a sucker. gonna have to be way more aggressive with my numbers going forward. this whole thing is a minefield.

so i did the math months later and that's like $18/hr before materials. and she was the one who suggested the price, i just nodded. i knew it was low but i didn't wanna be the guy who haggles with a friend. now every time i look at that painting i just see $18/hour staring back at me. i don't even know what i'd have said if i had to name it. 500? 800? feels fake to ask for that. but 200 also feels fake for 11 hours. so i'm stuck in the middle where both numbers feel wrong and i just don't talk about money with anyone i know personally anymore lol

I had this piece sitting in my studio forever. A birdhouse made from an old fuse box, wired with a single warm bulb inside. I thought $450 was fair, maybe even a little high. Three years. Nobody. Then this woman comes by, loves it, pays asking price no haggling. I was just relieved to have it gone. Then a friend texts me a screenshot from some HBO show. There's my fuse box birdhouse in the background of a scene. She looked it up, the set dresser rented it from a prop house for two grand. For a week. I charged $450 for something that took me years to make and someone else made almost 5x that in a week just for having it on a shelf in a fictional living room. And honestly I don't even know who to be mad at. The system? Myself for not knowing what things are worth? Both? Still trying to figure out what the actual lesson is here. Not sure it's just "charge more."

my cousin asked me to make a piece for her new apartment. i quoted her $400, already discounted, my normal price for that size is $650. she said "oh i thought family would just help out" and i caved and did it for $150 in materials. took me about 14 hours total. she posted it on instagram and someone asked where she got it. she told them it was "a gift from a friend." haven't done a family discount since. i'd rather give someone the piece outright than do that weird in-between thing where they feel like they're doing you a favor by paying you below your rate.

Years ago, before I had a real website or knew what I was doing with pricing, I ran a little workshop out of my studio. Just a few hours, materials included, you go home with a small piece. I charged €35 because I was scared to ask for more and it covered the tile and the wine. A tourist from Australia came, loved it, posted about it. Next thing I know it's on some blog. Fine. But then her friend emails me asking if I can do a private session for four people at the same price. I said yes because I'm an idiot who hadn't learned to say "that was a group rate." Now eight years later I sometimes still get people who found that old blog post and expect the €35 price. I've raised it to €65 and they look at me like I'm trying to sell them a car. I should have changed the name of the workshop or something. Instead I just have to be the bad guy every time someone shows up with a screenshot from 2016.

After years of being afraid of it, I raised my hourly rate from €45 to €65 at the beginning of this year. Not a dramatic jump. Reasonable for someone with my training and experience. I lost three regular clients in the first month. One of them told me I was "becoming expensive for a local painter." The other two just went quiet. And you know what? The commissions I've taken since then have been better. More interesting subjects, less revision demand, people who actually understand what they're asking for when they say "can you make the light softer." The clients who left were the ones who saw me as a service provider, not a painter. They wanted cheap, they got what they wanted somewhere else. I still feel a little guilty about the one who was a friend of a friend. But I did the math and I was earning less per hour than my daughter makes babysitting. That's not sustainable. That's not even dignified. If you raise your prices and nobody leaves, you probably didn't raise them enough. That's what my old teacher told me and I thought it was cynical. Now I think it's just true.

I was so scared to do it. Had this 30x40 oil I'd been sitting on for months, couldn't sell it at $800. I was convinced I was asking too much already, like who do I think I am. Friend basically forced me to relist it at $1150 just to see what would happen. I thought she was insane. It sold in four days. To someone who had scrolled past it at the lower price twice. Now I'm looking at my whole inventory like... was I the problem? Was it always about the price looking too cheap so people assumed it wasn't valuable? Because that's a gut punch. I've been undercharging for YEARS thinking I was being honest about where I'm at, and apparently I was just signaling that my work isn't worth taking seriously. I don't know how to feel about it. Happy for the money obviously. But also pissed at the whole system. And a little embarrassed.

Okay so I'm still pretty new to pricing my own work without a professor or a gallery telling me what to do and I think I massively undershot this one. A friend-of-a-friend reached out wanting a custom piece, her cat, sitting in a sunny windowsill, very specific reference photo she sent, gorgeous light honestly I was excited about it. I quoted $150 for a 16x20 watercolor which is like... insane when I actually stop and think about it. That's easily 15-20 hours of work when you factor in the back-and-forth and the sketching and the masking and the layering and fixing the thing I inevitably mess up. I did the math after I sent the message and it came out to like $8 an hour and I just sat there staring at my phone. I'm not mad at her she was thrilled with the price obviously lol. I'm mad at me. I keep doing this thing where I price based on what I think someone will pay instead of what the work is actually worth. And I KNOW better. I had a whole class on this. But when it's real and there's a real person on the other end asking nicely I just fold and throw out a number that feels "fair" to them and not to me. Anyway she's picking it up tomorrow and I'm gonna smile and take the cash and then I'm gonna spend the whole evening updating my rate sheet so I don't do this again. For the fifth time. 🫠 Anyone else have a number they immediately regretted the second it left their mouth?

A friend from art school, someone whose work I genuinely like, sold a paper piece at a fair in Stockholm for 12,000 SEK. Same size as what I do, similar material, similar time investment. I charge 3,500 for mine. We're at the same stage, we came out of the same program. I know I'm not being ripped off, I set my prices, nobody forced me. But the gap is hard to sit with. Makes me wonder if I'm undervaluing the work or if they're just better at selling. Probably both. I raised my small pieces by 500 SEK this month and it felt like a test I was going to fail.

i did a commission for a friend's mom last year. charged her 40% less than my usual rate because, you know, family connection. felt good at the time. she loved the piece, told everyone. now i'm getting calls from three of those referrals, and i'm realizing i've set a precedent i can't break without seeming like a total jerk. how do you disentangle yourself from that kind of thing? i'm almost tempted to just eat the loss and charge them full price, but the thought makes my eye twitch.

I spent years tweaking my website. Better photos, cleaner navigation, more process shots, less process shots, SEO keywords my friend who works in tech kept telling me to use. And I'd get maybe three inquiries a month, usually from students asking about internships I don't offer. Two months ago my domain expired and I just... didn't renew it. Put together a single PDF with recent work, editions, prices in a table, and my email at the bottom. It's ugly. It's just a document. I send it to people who DM me or write. That's it. And somehow this feels more honest? Like the website was performing professionalism for nobody in particular, and the PDF is just me handing someone what they asked for. I've sold more prints in the last eight weeks than in the previous six months of having a proper site. I don't know if this scales or if it only works because I'm a printmaker with edition sizes I can count on one hand. But I'm starting to think the whole "you need a professional web presence" thing was built for a different kind of practice, or maybe a different decade.

I took a commission back in February for a 16x20 landscape, a friend of a friend wanted a specific view from their vacation photos. I quoted $200 which is usually fair for that size and my level. What I didn't account for was the two weeks I spent staring at those reference photos, trying to figure out how to handle the lighting, sketching thumbnails in my head while I was folding laundry, completely rethinking the composition twice before I even touched a brush. By the time I actually started painting I had probably put in 6-8 hours of just... mental labor. And I didn't charge for any of it. Finished it in about 10 hours of actual painting time so the math works out to like $12/hour before supplies. I know you can't really bill for "thinking about it" but also, that was work, you know? It was work. I'm trying to figure out how to price differently next time without feeling like I'm nickel-and-diming someone. Maybe just raise the flat rate enough to cover it and stop overthinking.

So there's a new place opened down near the docks, lovely spot, they wanted a big linocut for the main wall, something of Galway Bay, rough sea, the whole bit. I was delighted with myself. Gave them the friends-and-family rate because they're sound and I wanted the work up somewhere people'd see it. €600, I said. Frame included. Generous, I thought. What I didn't do was keep a proper tally of the hours. Carving that thing, it's a big block, 60x40cm, all that water and sky and the little light breaking through, took me the guts of three weeks on and off. Proofing it, pulling the final edition, stretching the paper, framing it myself. Did the maths this morning. Roughly 40 hours all in. That's €15 an hour, and that's before materials, before the frame cost me sixty quid, before the petrol driving it down there. I'm not even angry about it, I'm just looking at the number and thinking, I'd have been better paid stacking shelves. But I'd also have been bored out of my skull, so there you go. Anyway the print looks savage up on the wall. I'll put the price up next time and see do I survive it.

Okay so I've been telling myself for months that I'd approach some local shops about carrying my prints and cards, just small ones, the cute plant shop on my corner, a bookstore I love. And I kept chickening out because sending a cold email with prices feels so much scarier than just posting on Instagram where people come to you. But last week I finally just walked into the bookstore with a little portfolio and asked if they had five minutes. The owner was so nice she almost made me cry?? She said yes on the spot, picked four designs, and I spent the weekend hyperventilating over formatting a proper invoice. Sent it this morning. Then my partner found me on the kitchen floor and I had to explain that no I wasn't sad, this is just what success feels like apparently. Anyway if anyone else has done the wholesale thing for the first time, how long until you stop feeling like you're going to get caught doing something you're not supposed to?? Asking for a friend who is me.

finally worked up the nerve to push my prices up in february. small jump, nothing crazy, a handbuilt mug went from €28 to €34, a medium sculptural piece from €80 to €96. i made a whole spreadsheet about it. felt very professional. then march and april happened and i sold literally nothing through my online shop. not one piece. i started checking my own site like an idiot, refreshing, "is the add to cart button broken??" no, just nobody wanted it at the new number. i almost caved and dropped them back down last week but my friend who's been doing this longer told me to wait. she said the first silence after a raise is just the market recalibrating, or something. sounded like bullshit at the time. may i've sold three pieces. not a landslide. but the weird thing is the people buying now don't haggle. nobody. before, every single sale came with a "any discount for buying two?" or a "could you do €25?" and i'd fold immediately. now they just... pay it. and i'm making more on three sales than i used to make on six. still feels fragile. like the second i relax the silence comes back. but i think she might have been right.