A photographer charging $3,000 per wedding and shooting 30 weddings a year can quietly lose $1,500 to $15,000 of that revenue to fees, and most never calculate which fees are actually taking it. There are two different hands in your pocket, and they deserve very different treatment: platform commissions, which you can eliminate completely, and payment processing fees, which you can only minimize.
We build Ultra, a platform for photographers, so we have an obvious interest in this topic. That is exactly why every number below links to the provider's own current pricing page, checked on the date of this post. Do the math yourself; that is the point of the article.
Fee number one: platform commissions
Some gallery and store platforms take a percentage of every sale you make through them, on top of their subscription price. The clearest public example: Pixieset's free plan takes a 15% commission on store sales, which drops to 0% on paid plans starting at $8 per month (billed annually).
The math on 15% is brutal at photography prices. Sell $10,000 of prints and digitals in a year on a free plan, and $1,500 of it left with the platform. The subscription that removes the commission costs $96 a year. Free plans with commissions are not free for anyone who actually sells; they are a loan against your future revenue.
The takeaway is not "Pixieset bad". Their paid plans drop the commission to zero, which is honest design. The takeaway is: before you use any platform's store or booking feature, find the commission line in their pricing. If you sell or book anything at all, a commission-free paid plan almost always beats a free plan with a percentage.
Fee number two: payment processing
Whoever moves the money charges for moving it. These fees are close to unavoidable, they just vary by provider and method:
- Stripe: 2.9% + 30¢ per domestic card transaction in the US
- PayPal: 2.99% + $0.49 for standard card payments, and 3.49% + $0.49 for PayPal checkout
On a $1,000 booking deposit, that is roughly $29 to $35 gone. On a 30-wedding year with $3,000 packages, processing alone runs around $2,600 to $3,100. You cannot get this to zero online, but you can keep it at the bottom of that range: prefer direct card processing over wallet checkouts where rates differ, and never accept a platform that adds its own percentage on top of the processor's.
Bank transfer for large balances is the one honest zero-percent option, and plenty of photographers use it for final payments. Its cost is friction: transfers do not auto-confirm bookings, do not handle reminders, and make refunds manual.
The worked example
Say you book 30 weddings at $3,000 with a $1,000 deposit paid online, and sell $8,000 in prints through your gallery store in a year:
- Free plan with 15% store commission + PayPal checkout: $1,200 commission on print sales + about $1,065 processing on deposits + $285 on the rest of print processing. Roughly $2,550 in fees, before the platform has charged you a single subscription dollar.
- Commission-free paid platform + direct card processing: $0 commission + about $900 processing on deposits at Stripe-level rates + the platform subscription (typically $84 to $300 per year). Roughly $1,000 to $1,200 all-in, and the subscription bought you the rest of the product too.
Same shoots, same clients, about $1,400 a year of difference. That is a lens, or half a wedding, for reading two pricing pages.
Where Ultra sits (disclosure included)
Ultra's Pro plan is $10 per month ($84 billed yearly) and includes the booking calendar with online payments at zero platform commission: we add no percentage on top of anything you charge. Your payment provider's processing rate still applies, because that money goes to the processor, not to us, and anyone who tells you otherwise is hiding their margin inside the rate. That is the honest limit of "no fees" claims from any platform, ours included.
If you already deliver galleries and take bookings somewhere, the twenty-minute exercise worth doing this week: open your platform's pricing page and your processor's rate page, and put your real yearly numbers into the two formulas above. Most photographers we talk to have never seen their all-in fee number, and it is usually larger than they guessed.