Pricing Products (And where we landed)
The art of frustration mitigation
Figuring out how much to price your products as a creative can be quite the struggle. In this article I aim to explain my approach to this process.
The first thing I’d like to explain is my financial perspective. I’m a 30 something american guy from Texas. I’ve been a member of the lower class since birth. I’ve been on food stamps. And when moviepass came out (that $10/mth 1 free movie a day thing back in 2017) I saw 216 movies in a single year. I take advantage of good deals when I can find them. My diet is almost 40% fast food because I use their apps and visit them when free food is offered. I’m still wearing clothes I wore in high school.
My point is, life is short, and because I don’t come from money, I look for ways to have fun/survive while spending the least amount of money possible. A $50 hardback book is something I’ll never consider. It’s not in the budget.
So when I launched my first game on Kickstarter in the summer of 2022, Miru, I priced the physical version of it at $10. I priced the digital edition at $5 and the ‘all in’ kit with dice & a journal for $20.
I get a few ‘why don’t you charge more?’ from other creatives. And I brushed that idea off. I want to be ‘affordable’. I don’t have other creative’s numbers. But every day, a digital copy of miru is sold. It’s still $5 2 years later. I hear other creatives ask me ‘why don’t you charge more?’ and I wonder if their higher priced PDFs sell as well. It just might and I’m throwing money away, but for some reason I can’t let go of the affordable $5 price. At the moment, I average about $362 a month (most of which is from miru) on itch. I’d love to hear how these numbers compare with folks who charge $10 or $15 for their PDFs.
Am I throwing money away by not charging more? All artists dream of living from their creative work. By not charging more am I denying myself the opportunity to the life of a working artist?
An approach I’ve noticed from other creatives in the zine world, is they’ll charge a higher price for their products. $15 digitals. $25 for the physicals. But they’ll also offer a free option, ‘community copies’. I don’t know if this works for them. I’d love to hear from creatives who do this. I have 2 things stuck in the back of my head when I see this as an option.
‘fuck you, pay me’. I foolishly went to school for graphic design (and later switched to film, but ultimately dropped out). As an artist, it’s been instilled in me that my work has value and I should charge for it. The ethics of how much of course are up to the beholder. The idea of giving something I’ve worked hard on for free (while also charging ‘more than affordable’ to others) to me, feels silly.
I can’t think of a single thing I’ve gotten for free that wasn’t a gift, that I hold precious. I can’t remember 200 of those ‘free’ movies I saw in 2017. In our capitalist society, we all have bills to pay. If given the option, I do think everything can and should be given for free. Mutual Aid and so on. But as the world currently stands, hope for exposure or a good review doesn’t pay the bills. I don’t want Miru to end up in a folder of free games on someone’s desktop never to be seen or played. I want it to end up in a folder titled ‘games I paid good money for and need to play.’
What we charge for our stuff is such an interesting journey for artists. There’s no real rulebook for it. Art is personal. When we pour our souls into a creative project, often the business / survival part of the deal is an after thought. There’s this extremely odd ethical dilemma the world puts on artists (they may not realize it) . On one hand, we must survive under capitalism. On the other, we are compelled to use our creativity to make our dark world a brighter place.
Members of the Atopia Discord are constantly berating me about pricing. I go back and forth every other week trying to figure out what to charge for the upcoming kickstarter. The industry standard in the board game world and in most industries that end up on retail shelves is to charge 5x what it costs to produce ‘the goods’.
I’m working on a hex kit for the miru games. It will cost about $12 to make and get to me, assuming my cost as the artist is $0 (criminal). This means, I should charge $60 according to industry wisdom. But my hope was to charge $25 when I had the original idea.
Of course this means I’ve settled on $30 for the campaign and $35 for after the campaign. It also means I won’t be able to offer the hex kit to retailers. The margins don’t make sense then. In the retailer world, their stores are expensive to operate. (Landlords and their rent amiright?) For retailers to survive, they pay half the cost of the MSRP of a product. If the MSRP is $35 they pay $17.5. And if the product costs $12 to make, well, you see the dilemma. Who can live off $5?
Spending $12k to make the hex kits only to make $5 a box seems like a risky bet. It’s quite dangerous letting ethics get in the way of good business. My odd need to price ‘affordably’, to be loved by more people who can buy my stuff, and the pressure to survive have put me in this weird spot. For half the cost of what the industry suggests, I give up the chance to be in retail, but I allow the opportunity for more folks to experience the fun that will come from what I make. This balance of being ethical under capitalism is a funny one. So funny I made a pin about it.
If you’re a creative, how do you decide your prices?
If you’re a consumer, what do you think is a fair price for creative products?