Free art commission pricing calculator. Enter your target hourly rate, base hours, piece type, extra characters, background complexity, usage license, and rush surcharge; outputs a defensible commission price broken down by each multiplier.
Built and maintained by Paul Clark, Redmoon Software
Use when a client asks for a quote and you want a consistent, defensible number instead of guessing — especially useful for comparing personal vs. commercial pricing on the same piece.
Unlike the 3D Print or embroidery calculators, there's no physical material cost here — pricing is purely time and license-value based, closer in spirit to a freelance rate calculator than a materials calculator.
Quote this client $135.00 for a half piece under a personal license.
Base price = hourly rate × base hours × a piece-type multiplier (bust ×1 up to full scene ×4) × a background-complexity multiplier.
Each additional character adds 60% of the base price rather than a full duplicate, since composition and background work are shared across figures in the same piece.
The combined price is then scaled by a usage-license multiplier (personal ×1 to commercial ×2.5) and a rush surcharge percentage on top.
A commercial buyer profits from the artwork indefinitely — on merchandise, ads, or products — so the usage-license multiplier charges ×2.5 for commercial use versus ×1 for personal, non-monetized use.
Each additional character adds 60% of the base price rather than a full duplicate charge, since pose planning, lighting, and background work are already shared across the whole composition.
Most artists charge 10–30% on top of the normal price for a significantly shortened turnaround. The calculator applies your entered rush percentage as a straight surcharge on the final price.
Input
Half-body piece, simple background, personal use, no rush, $25/hr rate, 3 base hours.
Output
Suggested price: $135.00.
Base price = $25 × 3 hours × 1.8 (half-body) × 1 (simple background) = $135. With no extra characters, a personal-use ×1 multiplier, and no rush fee, the final price equals the base price.
Commission pricing works backwards from the income you need, the hours you can actually bill and your overheads. That is deliberately not "what similar artists charge", because the visible market rate is set by a mix of hobbyists subsidising the work and full-timers who have to live on it, and copying it tells you nothing about whether it covers your costs.
The number that surprises people is billable hours. Time spent on communication, references, revisions, invoicing and promotion is not billable, and a full working week rarely contains more than about half its hours in billable work.
Unbounded revisions are the standard way a fairly priced commission becomes an underpaid one. The defence is a revision policy stated up front — a set number included, additional rounds charged — and that only works if it was agreed before the work started.
Deposits do related work. A non-refundable deposit covers the abandoned-commission case, which is common enough to be a real cost rather than an edge case, and it filters out clients who were never going to commit.
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