Clientflow, galleries, editing, culling, storage, e-sign. Price the layers you actually pay for, add the card fees on your bookings, and see the year and the per job number.
Tiers reflect published 2026 price ranges, checked July 2026. Every layer takes your own figure instead. Product names belong to their owners; Kepla is not affiliated with any of them.
Two bars, same scale. On most working stacks the second one is longer, which is the part that surprises people.
Subscriptions and card fees only. Your own hours moving data between tools that do not talk to each other are not in this number, and they are not small.
Checked against published pricing in July 2026, three realistic stacks land at about $77, $93 and $205 a month, which is roughly $924 to $2,460 a year before a single card fee. The full working, layer by layer, is in what a photography tool stack really costs.
Then the fees. At a 2.7 percent plus 10 cent card rate, $60,000 of bookings adds roughly $1,630 a year. For most photographers that single line is larger than every subscription combined, and it is the one that never appears on a renewal email.
Two costs never reach a statement. The first is your hours as the integration layer: when the CRM and the gallery do not share data, you are the connection between them. Thirty to forty five minutes a job of copying, linking and marking off, at sixty jobs a year, is a working week you did not bill.
The second is bigger. Because no single system sees the whole relationship, nobody owns the follow up. The unsigned contract sits, the balance ages, and last spring's newborn client never hears from you at month eleven. One recovered rebooking is worth more than a year of most subscriptions. The rebooking templates and the full stack breakdown both go at this.
Priced at July 2026 rates, a lean stack runs about $77 a month, a common stack about $93, and a full stack with premium clientflow, an advanced gallery plan, separate e-sign and storage about $205. Card processing sits on top of all three.
They are usually the largest line and the least itemised. At 2.7 percent plus 10 cents, $60,000 of bookings is roughly $1,630 a year, more than most photographers pay for every subscription combined.
A lean clientflow tool, an entry or free gallery plan, and one editing subscription. The larger saving is almost always removing overlap rather than downgrading: paying twice for e-sign, contracts or storage another tool already includes.
Subscriptions and card fees only. It does not price the hours you spend moving data between tools, or the bookings lost when nothing owns the follow up. Those are covered in the full breakdown.
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