A Beginner-to-Expert Roadmap for Videography Pricing

Upgrade your location with Peerspace

Besides upgrading your gear, may also need to book a stunning video shoot location, which you can do right here on Peerspace. Booking a Peerspace allows you to utilize a professional environment for your client shoots and other creative projects.

Whether you’re working on a music video, a promotional video, or anything in between, there’s a Peerspace to match your style and budget.

Here are a few of our favorite Peerspace production studios to serve as examples:

• This film studio in Ravenswood, Chicago, IL with a corner green screen cyc wall, a lighting grid, and concrete chroma green flooring
• This professional videography studio in Morrisville, NC with natural and studio lighting, backdrops, a dressing room, and planning space
• This large, open videography studio in Orlando, FL with a corner cyc wall, pro gear, and several filming areas
• This production studio with custom video wall in Los Angeles, CA with projection mapping, an on-site editing and screening room, and a DIT station
• This fully-equipped photo and video studio in London, UK with professional lighting gear, backdrops, hair and makeup facilities, a loungem and assistants
• This full-service video and live broadcast studio in Seattle, WA with grip and production packages, a catered kitchen, and plenty of equipment
• This fully-equipped production studio in Toronto, ON with props, professional equipment, easy load-in and out, and a dressing room

As you can see, many Peerspace venues include professional gear, like lighting and backdrops, either built into the price or as add-ons from the host. Whatever your chosen location includes or is considered an add-on is clearly stated on the listing page, so there’s never any confusion prior to booking.

Speaking of well-equipped studios, check out these 11 creative backdrop ideas for your next shoot!

Your first client and the “day rate”

Your first client will likely be a small local business, such as an artisan coffee shop or the car dealership down the street. Let’s say they need a short promotional video shot and edited within a week to post on their Facebook page.

An excellent baseline for your videography pricing is a day rate. A day rate is a set price that you can advertise to clients for eight hours of on-location shooting. In the beginning, you can charge a day rate for the time on set. Then, as part of that commitment, you will edit the video within one week of turnaround time.

A great starting point for your day rate is $150/day. Videography is a specialized skill, so $150/day comes out to $18.75/hour. As such, it’s above the wages of an unspecialized skill. Yet, it’s not so high that a lack of experience and polish will hurt your hiring chances.

Raising your day rate

At some point in your career, you’re going to need to raise your videography pricing. This may happen after purchasing new equipment or developing your skills as a videographer. If you started at $150/day, including the edit, the first step would be splitting your filming and editing prices.

When you’ve gotten better at filming beautiful shots and consider yourself comfortable with editing a good video, raise your day rate to $200 and start charging $100 for the edit. This effectively doubles your earnings and communicates the different value propositions of your filming and editing skills.

The next tier as you get better is a $350/day rate and $150 for the edit. When you reach this price bracket, it’s time to start looking at another videography pricing framework.

Videography pricing by project

Pricing your videos by project presents the greatest opportunity to increase earning potential for your videography. Pricing by project shifts the clients’ focus from how much effort you are giving to the production. They then focus on the value of the completed video for their goals.

Especially when you’re more skilled, a video that you spend a couple of days on could earn a client thousands or millions of dollars in revenue for the right ad targeted wisely. That’s a lot more valuable than your $350/day rate.

Working with glamour influencers? Then you need to see our creative video ideas for beauty gurus!

Market yourself well

Effective marketing is crucial for businesses of every size, and even more so when you’re starting out. After all, people cannot hire you if they don’t know your business exists! Therefore, it’s wise to invest lots of time and some money into raising awareness about your brand.

Start by posting your projects on social media, like Instagram and TikTok, and create a professional LinkedIn page. If you do not already have a professional website, this is a good time to start one. Here, you can display your portfolio, an “about me” page to detail your experience and passions, and share a pricing page if you like.

You can also start pricing per project by creating a sample one-minute video in your style. Then, sell that video to other brands or personal brands for a flat fee of $500. This is very effective for marketing your videography because you can create a sample video with graphics and color treatment as a template for future videos and show it to new potential clients.

Your current marketing sounds like this, “My time costs this $350/day, and it will take me one day to film. Plus, it’s $150 for the edit to make the video you want in a week.” After shifting to a project-based pricing model, it’ll sound a lot better, “Here is what I did for X company. If you want this with your logos and message, it’s $500 and a week turnaround.”

Places to pitch your work

If you go the freelance route and work for yourself, you’ll have to be more creative when it comes to attracting clients. If you’re part of a local videographer company, they typically arrange the jobs for you.

There are many platforms that make it as easy as possible to find work as a freelance videographer. You can list your business on Thumbtack, Upwork, Fiverr, and Vimeo, to name a few. Be sure to build complete profiles on these platforms and link to your professional website and social media accounts.

The more time and effort you put into these, the more professional you look. The more professional you look, the more money you can make.

Find your video pricing comfort zone

As you create a larger body of work and develop your skills, you can start charging more for your work. Perhaps you sell the same kind of video, with your new skills a year into your career, at $1,000 or $2,500. The right clients with suitable needs will pay almost any price if you make them confident that it will be worthwhile.

There is no upper limit to videography pricing by the project. It is not uncommon for videographers to pitch and close the deal on corporate videos for Silicon Valley tech companies at $50,000 for a single 10-minute video.

A great rule of thumb when you’re trying to grow your income: find a price that you’re comfortable with asking of your client, then double it. Even if you negotiate back down, you’ll likely land above the original number.

Is your client an aspiring content creator? Then you need to see our creative YouTube video ideas next!