Subscription vs Per-Project Fees: Which Costs a Media Business Less?

A subscription charges the same every month however many properties you shoot, while per-project fees add a cost to each job, so the subscription comes out cheaper once your monthly volume passes the point where the two totals meet. Below that point, in a slow month or for a business that delivers photos alone, paying per project costs less.

Finding that point takes one figure from your own books: what a typical job costs you to produce.

Where a Per-Project Cost Comes From

Every deliverable beyond the photos brings work or a fee with it. Panoramas have to be stitched into a tour, the light in each photo corrected, the floor plan measured and drafted, the video edited, and the tour hosted for as long as the listing needs it. Some of that you do yourself at the desk, and some you pay for each time, as when you outsource the editing or send the measurements to a drafting service.

These costs grow with the job. A larger property means more panoramas to stitch and a bigger plan to draw, and each extra the client chooses adds its own charge. Growing the business works the same way. More jobs mean hiring editors, adding software licences and paying more fees, and a busy month can run over a budget set in a quiet one.

To put a number on a typical job, add up what each part costs you per property, counting your own hours at a rate you set:

• editing the photos, in your hours or an editor's fee
• stitching the panoramas for the tour
• measuring and drafting the floor plan
• editing the video
• hosting the tour while it stays online
• your software licences, divided across the month's jobs

Leave out whatever you don't sell. If no client buys a video from you, it isn't one of your costs.

Finding the Break-Even Month

Divide the monthly subscription by your cost per job, and the result is the number of jobs a month at which the two models cost the same. Below it, paying per project is cheaper; above it, the subscription is.

Take some made-up round numbers, chosen only for easy arithmetic: a subscription of 500 a month and production costs of 50 a job. The two meet at ten jobs. In a month of six jobs, per-project costs come to 300 and the subscription still costs 500, so it is 200 dearer. In a month of twenty, paying per job adds up to 1,000 against the same 500, and the subscription saves half.

A business whose volume swings has to look at both kinds of month, because the subscription doesn't shrink when the diary does. Work out the average over the months you would commit to, then check how many slow months you could carry. A subscription also runs for a term, so check its length before you compare.

Per-project fees stay the better deal when your volume sits below the break-even most months, or when you deliver photos alone. A photographer who sells no floor plans, tours or videos has few per-job costs for a subscription to take over. Giraffe360's page for photographers says as much: it may be a weaker fit if you only need traditional photo delivery.

What a Fixed Cost Changes in Your Own Pricing

When every add-on carries a cost of its own, you price it separately and ask the agent whether they want to pay for the video and the floor plan as well, and often the answer is no. Once those deliverables are covered by a fee you pay anyway, adding them to a job costs you little beyond the time to deliver them, so you can sell packages in place of a list of extras. The agent gets more media for the listing, and the job is worth more to you.

You also know your production cost before the month starts. That makes it easier to price a large contract or a move into a new area, because the cost of each extra job no longer has to be guessed.

Anything a subscription charges on top of its monthly fee belongs back in the per-job figure, and it moves the break-even.

What the Monthly Fee Covers and What It Meters

With the Giraffe360 camera, one capture gives a property's HDR photos, floor plans, virtual tour and videos, and Content Studio edits, hosts and shares them. The stitching, light correction, drafting and hosting then come with the plan and stop being costs per job. What the plan includes differs by country; in the US the camera plan lists unlimited projects a year, and elsewhere it lists a monthly allowance of camera projects.

The AI tools are metered. AI Enhance on still photos, Stage a room among them, Stills to Video clips, AI-enhanced floor plan renders and marketing content all use AI credits. Each tool shows the cost before you generate and charges only when a generation returns a result. Each camera comes with free credits, and beyond them a Spending limit decides how many paid credits the team may use, from none to a custom amount.

Project counts can grow too. Under the merge and split rules, a large capture can count as more than one project, a merged project with more than 40 stills or 40 scans counts as several, a merge made more than 14 days after the project was created carries a fee, and a split is always charged.

Both show in Manage organisation, under Billing: Usage breakdown gives each month's projects and merges, and the AI enhance panel shows the paid credits used. Add those to the month's fee, divide by the jobs you shot, and set the result against the per-job cost you started with.