Virtual staging cost calculator

Read the rate before you read the result

The default per-photo rate on this page is $30. Treat it as a placeholder, not a finding. Per-photo virtual staging in the US is quoted anywhere from a few dollars for a bulk overnight service to several times this for a designer-led one with revisions included, and the spread is wide enough that a single national figure is not a useful claim.

What you should do is put in the number on your own vendor's last invoice. That is the only rate the comparison is actually about, and it is the one that makes the result mean something.

The model also assumes 8 photos per listing, which is a working number for the principal rooms rather than the whole set. Plans here allow up to ten photos per listing; if you stage four rooms or you stage twelve, the arithmetic moves accordingly.

What the two sides represent

The per-photo side scales with everything: every listing, every room, every re-shoot. It is the cost structure that makes staging a decision you take per photograph, which is why per-photo buyers tend to stage fewer rooms than they would like to.

The plan side is flat. The Agent subscription covers six listings a month whether you use one or six, so the line does not move as volume rises within the quota. That is the whole reason the two diverge, and it is also the reason the plan looks bad at low volume and good at high volume rather than being uniformly better.

Neither side includes re-rolls, because ours are free and do not consume quota. If your current vendor charges for revisions, add that in — for a lot of agents it is a bigger number than they expect once they count how often a first render gets sent back.

Where the comparison stops being useful

Below about two vacant listings a month, a subscription is the wrong shape regardless of what the slider says. The $19 per-listing purchase covers a lumpy pipeline without quota sitting unused, and we would rather point that out here than have you find it out on the second invoice.

Above six listings a month you are into Office territory — twenty-five listings, three seats, a white-label gallery link — where the per-photo math changes again. The calculator does not model that; the pricing page does.

And the whole thing assumes your listing volume is the constraint. For a team, the real constraint is often seats and coordination rather than cost per image, which is not something a slider can show you.

• Full pricing and per-photo math →
• Compare the plans →

The number the slider cannot show

A per-photo cost changes what you spend. A flat cost changes what you decide, because the marginal cost of staging one more room in a listing you have already opened is zero — and the rooms that stop getting skipped are usually the ones a buyer most needed help reading.

That behavioural effect is real and it is not quantifiable from this page, so the calculator does not pretend to. It compares a stated per-photo rate against a flat plan price up to the Agent plan's quota, and nothing else.

It is also why a cheaper per-photo rate matters less than it looks. The saving on the rooms you already stage is arithmetic. The rooms you start staging are where the difference in how the listing performs would come from, and that is not on the slider either.

About this calculator

Where does the $30 per photo default come from?

It is an illustrative input, not a researched market average, and we would rather say that plainly than dress an estimate up as data. Replace it with the rate on your own vendor's invoice — the comparison is only meaningful against a real number.

Why 8 photos per listing?

It is a working figure for staging the principal rooms rather than an entire photo set. Plans here cover up to ten photos per listing, so use your own average room count if it differs.

Does this include revisions?

Not on the per-photo side, because vendors handle revisions very differently — some include a round, some bill each one. Ours are free and unlimited and do not count against quota, so if your vendor charges for them, adding that to the per-photo rate makes the comparison fairer.

Is the saving really that large at high volume?

The arithmetic is just volume times rate against a flat fee, so it grows fast with pipeline size — which is exactly why you should be suspicious of it as a marketing claim, including ours. What it does not tell you is whether a subscription suits your billing, and at low volume it usually does not.