Photography Pricing Calculator and Business Toolkit, Cost of Doing Business, AI Skill for Claude & ChatGPT, Photographer Package Pricing

Studio Business-in-a-Box is an AI skill for Claude and ChatGPT, made for photographers. Runs the cost-of-doing-business calculation photographers skip, including the ~30 unpaid hours behind every wedding, then reprices your packages, maps the cash-flow year underneath them, and writes your whole client email suite. Comes back every quarter to check whether the floor moved.

Instant download. Works on the free tier. No coding. Fully booked and still short? It's the math.

WHAT IS AN AI SKILL?
Think of it as a trained assistant you add to Claude or ChatGPT. It is a small folder of files: the step-by-step method the AI must follow, the templates it fills in, the checks it runs on itself, and a worked example. You load it once (about a minute), then talk to the AI in plain English the way you would brief a colleague. Instead of a generic chat answer, you get the finished piece of work as a real file you can print, send or open in Excel. No coding, no software to install, nothing to configure. It runs inside your own Claude or ChatGPT account.

THE PROBLEM IT SOLVES
You had the best year yet. The calendar was full from April to October, you turned work away, and somehow the bank balance never reflected any of it.

The reason is arithmetic rather than talent: the eight-hour wedding is really about thirty-eight hours once you count enquiry emails, the pre-shoot call, travel, culling, editing, the gallery, the follow-up and the tax you owe on all of it. Price the eight and you lose money on the thirty.

ABOUT THE EXAMPLES BELOW
The figures and names come from the built-in demo: Elena Brooks, a Brisbane wedding photographer planning and pricing a Noosa elopement. Type "demo" after setup and you watch the same run happen in front of you before you type a single real number.

WHAT IT DOES (6 JOBS, ONE SKILL)
1. Run the CODB
Every cost line, every formula written out, the whole required-revenue to true-cost-per-booking chain — grossed up for tax, and ending in the row that says what you actually keep.

2. Rebuild your packages
Three tiers priced from your own math, with second shooters, associates and outsourced editing costed into the tier that uses them. Shooting commercial instead? You get creative fee plus licensing plus expenses, with a day-rate floor and a usage ladder.

3. Map your cash-flow year
Twelve rows that separate the months you sign bookings from the months you shoot them, with the insurance renewal and the tax bill sitting in the month they actually land. Out come two numbers: your trough, and the buffer that covers it.

4. Review your prices each quarter
Ten minutes on your actuals, decided by a trigger table with printed thresholds. 80% of the season booked before it starts, raise 10–15%. Only 20% of enquiries converting, and price isn't your problem yet — here's the order to diagnose it in.

5. Answer “can I go full-time?”
Replacement income counts the benefits you'd have to buy for yourself, asked in your country's terms. Then bookings needed against bookings achieved, the capacity test, six months of runway, and a verdict from a table rather than from encouragement.

6. Write the client emails
Enquiry through gallery delivery, the review ask timed to the delight moment, and the four nobody wants to write: the price objection, the ghosted enquiry, the scope-creep ask, and the price-rise announcement.

WHAT YOU GET
• CODB calculator, ending in what you actually keep per hour
• Cash-flow year: your trough month and a buffer target
• Packages from your math — or commercial fee plus licensing

Change one number next year and the whole chain updates. Private documents stay separate from client-facing ones:
• The CODB calculator as a live spreadsheet
• Your pricing strategy sheet, plus the client-facing package one-pager (or the commercial rate and usage sheet)
• The cash-flow year: twelve rows, with your trough month and buffer target computed
• The quarterly price review, and the full-time plan when you ask for it
• The full client email suite, questionnaires, and a plain-English contract checklist

YOUR FIRST FIVE MINUTES (copy-paste any of these)
› Price my work — here are my costs and income goal.
› Rebuild my packages. Middle one should be the obvious pick.
› Map my cash-flow year. I'm dead in July.
› Write my gallery-delivery email with the review ask.
› demo — watch a fully booked year turn out to be losing money.

HOW TO SET IT UP (about a minute)
1. Download the zip and unzip it. Inside: a START-HERE file, INSTALL steps for Claude, and CHATGPT-SETUP for ChatGPT.
2. Claude app: Settings → Capabilities → Skills → Upload skill (or add the files to a Project). Claude Code: drop the folder into ~/.claude/skills/. ChatGPT: follow CHATGPT-SETUP (copy-paste, about two minutes).
3. Type "demo" to watch the skill run on a built-in example. Then give it your own details in plain English.

WHO MADE THIS
The Skill Mastery builds AI skills for working professionals: photographers, filmmakers, creators, marketers and sales teams. We don't start from what AI can do. We start from how the job is actually done, the methods the trade already trusts (here: sunset-anchored timelines, cost-of-doing-business pricing and local search), the numbers that have to be right, and the mistakes that cost real money. Then we engineer the skill so the AI follows those rules every single time, and we test it the way a buyer would use it: on the built-in demo, on a cold scenario it has never seen, and in a currency other than our own. Every skill ships with a demo mode, a self-check, and a plain list of what it can't do.

WHY NOT JUST ASK THE CHATBOT?
• It counts the unpaid hours. Roughly thirty hours hide behind every eight-hour wedding. A chatbot prices the shoot; this prices the job, and it keeps bookings and shoot-days as separate numbers so a newborn first-year plan can't hide three sessions inside one invoice.

• It grosses up for tax. Skip that single step and the demo's required booking reads $4,050 instead of $5,351 — a price list that leaves her $25,500 below the take-home she actually asked for. It's the step nearly every pricing guide misses.

• It's built to be reopened. The review mode loads your last sheet, runs the triggers on what really happened, and stages any raise over about 25% across two seasons with the cost of staging on the page: $15,680 for the year, in the demo's case. A decision, rather than a drift.

WHAT IT WON'T DO (read this before buying)
• The contract material is a plain-English checklist of what your contract should cover, not legal advice. An hour with a local lawyer makes it bulletproof, and it says so.
• The cash-flow year is a model, not a forecast. It maps the money your own bookings and costs imply; it can't know a client will pay late or a body will die in August, which is exactly what the buffer number is for.
• It prices the business; it can't make a market pay more than it will. The demo's own 41% move gets staged and costed rather than waved through, and where your target implies an unrealistic booking count it says so plainly.

FAQ
Q: How is this different from just asking Claude or ChatGPT?
A: A chatbot gives you a rate that sounds about right. Studio Business-in-a-Box runs the full cost-of-doing-business chain with every formula visible, counts the unpaid hours behind each booking, grosses the result up for tax so your income goal is what you actually keep, and hands you the spreadsheet. Then it maps the same numbers across twelve months, which is the question a rate estimate can never answer.

Q: I'm not in the US. Does the tax part work?
A: Yes. It works in your currency and treats GST or VAT as its own separate stream rather than assuming a US model. One of the three worked examples is a newborn studio in Leeds priced in GBP, where studio rent is the biggest cost line and her flagship first-year plan pays £6.97 per real hour against £14.33 for her cheapest session.

Q: I shoot commercial and brand work, not weddings. Does it fit?
A: Commercial work is quoted as creative fee plus licensing plus expenses at cost, never as one number. The day-rate floor comes straight from your own chain (required revenue ÷ shoot-days per year), the usage ladder runs media × territory × term in your currency as a labelled directional estimate, exclusivity is priced as its own item with an end date, and licence renewals go in the diary as revenue with no shoot-days attached.

Q: My year looks profitable but my account is empty in July. What then?
A: That's a timing question, and it gets its own twelve-row map: the months you sign bookings, the months you shoot them, and the lumpy costs in the month they land instead of averaged into invisibility. It ends with your trough and a buffer target. If the year finishes below zero it says so plainly — that is a pricing problem wearing a cash-flow costume, and no reserve fixes it.

Q: Is it a subscription?
A: No. A one-time purchase, yours to keep, updates included.

Q: Do I need a paid Claude or ChatGPT plan?
A: No. The free tiers run it. Paid plans give you longer sessions and stronger models, which is nicer but not required.

Q: Claude or ChatGPT: which should I use?
A: Both are included and both work. Claude gives the fuller experience because skills upload directly; ChatGPT setup is a two-minute copy-paste from the included CHATGPT-SETUP file.

Q: Do I need to know how to code?
A: No. You type in plain English. Setup is upload-a-file, and every step is written out for non-technical people.

Q: Does it work outside the US, in my currency?
A: Yes. It works in your currency, your date format and your market. It never converts or invents exchange rates.

Q: Can I use it for client work?
A: Yes. One purchase is a perpetual single-user licence; everything it produces is yours to use, unrestricted, for your own business or your clients. You just can't resell or share the skill files themselves.

Q: Is my data private?
A: It runs entirely inside your own Claude or ChatGPT account. We never see your numbers, clients or files.

Q: Can I use it on my phone?
A: Set it up once on a computer; after that it works from the Claude and ChatGPT phone apps too.

Q: Do I get updates?
A: Yes, free updates to this version. If a new version ships, message us on Etsy for the update.

Q: What if it doesn't work for me?
A: Digital files can't be returned on Etsy, but message us and we'll make it right, whether that's a fix, a walkthrough or a refund. A real person replies.

PART OF THE STUDIO SUITE
Also in this shop: Shoot Planner, Get-Found Engine, or the full Studio Suite bundle at a saving. They share one profile, so you describe your business once and every skill reads it.

INSTANT DIGITAL DOWNLOAD
One .zip file, delivered by Etsy the moment you buy. Nothing physical will be shipped. Free updates for the current version. Questions before or after buying: message us here on Etsy, a real person replies.
Version 2.0.0.

AI disclosure: this toolkit was designed and written by The Skill Mastery with the help of AI tools, then tested by hand (every calculation, template and demo checked). It runs inside Claude or ChatGPT; it is not a standalone app. Not affiliated with Anthropic or OpenAI. Claude and ChatGPT are trademarks of their respective owners.