Early in my accounting career, I audited a small manufacturing company that had been pricing its flagship product the same way for eleven years.
Nobody could tell me why. The number wasn’t wrong exactly. It covered materials, covered labor, left a thin margin on top. But nobody in the building had actually recalculated it in over a decade. It had simply become the price, the way a fact becomes a fact once enough people repeat it without checking.
When we finally reworked the numbers, the price needed to move up almost thirty percent just to reflect what the product actually cost to make, let alone what it was worth to the customers who kept buying it anyway.
I think about that audit more than almost anything else from that part of my career, mostly because I keep watching artists make the exact same mistake, just without a spreadsheet to catch it.
Most artists set a price once, early, usually while they still feel uncertain about whether anyone will pay for their work at all. That first number is rarely calculated. It’s guessed, apologized for in advance, and set low enough that a no would feel less painful than a yes would feel exciting.
Then something strange happens. The price stops moving.
The work keeps improving. The Photoshop skills sharpen. The color grading gets more controlled. The collections become more cohesive, more intentional, more clearly the artist’s own. Everything about the work changes except the one number attached to it.
I did this myself for longer than I’d like to admit. A print that once felt ambitious to price at forty dollars was still priced at forty dollars two years later, long after the work behind it had become unrecognizable in quality from where it started. I hadn’t decided to keep the price the same. I had simply never gone back to look at it, the same way that manufacturing client never went back to look at theirs.
Underpricing doesn’t usually announce itself as a decision. It survives by never being questioned.
There’s a specific reason artists are especially prone to this, and it isn’t laziness. It’s that pricing creative work feels subjective in a way that pricing a manufactured product doesn’t. A widget has a bill of materials. A print has hours of refinement, a texture library built over years, a visual language developed through hundreds of earlier pieces the buyer will never see. None of that shows up on an invoice the way a materials cost does, so artists default to pricing what’s visible instead of what’s actually there.
What’s visible is the file. What’s actually there is everything it took to be able to make that file look effortless.
This is where the auditing habit turned out to be more useful than any pricing advice I ever read online. In that world, you don’t price around a feeling. You build the number from its parts and let the parts tell you what it has to be. Materials, labor, overhead, margin. Nobody asks whether thirty dollars feels fair. They ask whether thirty dollars covers what actually went into the thing.
I started applying that same structure to my own work, almost as an experiment, mostly because I didn’t trust my gut on this particular question anymore. My gut had been wrong for two straight years.
The exercise is uncomfortable the first time you do it honestly. You have to count hours you’d rather not count, including the ones that don’t feel like “real” work. Sourcing reference images. Testing three color directions before landing on the one you keep. Rebuilding a composition from scratch because the first version wasn’t saying what you wanted. None of that shows up in the final file, and all of it belongs in the price.
Then there’s the part artists almost never account for, the years spent developing the visual language in the first place. A collector isn’t only paying for the hours spent on this piece. They’re paying for the ability to make decisions quickly and well, an ability that took years and a considerable amount of unpaid failure to build. Skipping that in the math is how a piece that took two focused hours to execute gets priced as though those were the only two hours that ever mattered.
Once I actually built the number instead of guessing it, something predictable happened. It went up. Not dramatically, not in a way that felt like gouging anyone, but enough that the price finally described the work instead of apologizing for it.
What surprised me wasn’t the number. It was what happened after I raised it.
Nothing happened. Or more precisely, nothing bad happened. The buyers who had been buying at the old price mostly kept buying at the new one. A few conversations got a little quieter than they used to be, and I noticed I cared about that far more than the actual numbers justified. The fear of pricing accurately turned out to be much louder than any real consequence of doing it.
I think this is the part that trips up most artists, myself included for a long time. The resistance to raising a price rarely comes from the market. It comes from the artist’s own discomfort with being taken seriously at a number that matches the work. Underpricing feels safe because it keeps the stakes low. If something priced at twenty dollars doesn’t sell, that’s easy to shrug off. If something priced at what it’s actually worth doesn’t sell, that starts to feel like a verdict on the work itself, and a lot of artists would rather never find out.
That avoidance has a cost, even when it doesn’t feel like one in the moment. Underpricing doesn’t just leave money on the table. It quietly signals, to the artist and to the buyer, that the work isn’t fully finished, fully considered, fully worth standing behind. A price is information. A price that hasn’t been recalculated in years is telling a story the work itself stopped agreeing with a long time ago.
None of this means pricing should be reckless or disconnected from what a specific market can actually bear. A collection sold through a small Etsy shop in its first year has a different ceiling than a gallery-represented artist with a decade of collectors behind them, and pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone. But there’s a wide, well-lit space between reckless and afraid, and most artists are living much closer to the second one than they realize.
The habit I’d recommend isn’t a single pricing decision. It’s a recurring one, the same way an audit isn’t a single event but a scheduled return to numbers that would otherwise sit unquestioned. Every few months, I now sit down with the same discipline I once brought to a client’s books and ask the only question that actually matters: does this price still describe this work, or is it describing the artist I used to be.
Most of the time, by the time I ask, the honest answer is that it’s been describing the old version of me for a while.
The manufacturing company I mentioned at the start eventually raised their price and kept every customer that mattered. A few smaller accounts left. The ones who stayed were the ones who had always been paying for what the product actually was, not for what it happened to cost when nobody was checking.
I think most artists would find the same thing if they finally ran the numbers instead of guessing at them. The work has usually already outgrown the price. It’s just been waiting for someone to go back and look.
About the Author
Orlando Monteagudo combines analytical thinking with mixed media experimentation, Photoshop workflows, AI-assisted creativity, and practical digital refinement systems designed to help artists create more cohesive, polished, and sustainable creative work.
Keywords
pricing art, how to price digital art, artist pricing mistakes, undercharging for creative work, pricing strategy for artists, Etsy pricing for artists, valuing creative work, artist business systems, print pricing, digital product pricing, creative entrepreneurship, sustainable art business