Guide
What a client gallery costs per wedding: the real math
What hosting a wedding gallery costs you: storage per wedding, plan price divided by weddings kept online, expiry as the lever, and worked examples at 15 and 40 weddings a year.
A client gallery costs most wedding photographers between $3 and $15 per wedding per year to host, and the number is driven by 2 decisions, not by the platform: how long galleries stay online, and whether video is in them. The math is short. Estimate storage per wedding, multiply by the number of weddings online at once, pick the plan that holds it, and divide the plan’s yearly price by the weddings you deliver in a year. The result is your hosting cost per wedding.
The examples below use FOCL Galleries prices because those are ours and we can state them exactly. Other platforms price differently: some by storage, some by gallery count, some with bandwidth or download caps, some with a commission on prints. Run the same 4 steps with their numbers, from their pricing page, today.
Step 1: storage per wedding
Use your own figure. Open the exported folders from your last 3 weddings and average them. If you have not measured, these are rules of thumb:
- Photos: 1.5 to 4 GB for a 600 to 800 photo JPEG gallery at quality 80 to 85. 3 GB is a safe planning number.
- Highlight film: 1 to 3 GB.
- Full ceremony edit: 5 to 15 GB depending on resolution and length.
- Engagement session: about 0.5 GB.
The detail behind those numbers, including a per-camera table, is in how much storage wedding galleries take.
Step 2: weddings online at once
Storage is not what you upload this year. It is every gallery still published.
Weddings online at once = weddings per year × years each gallery stays up.
With a 12-month expiry and a quarterly cleanup, you hold roughly 1 to 1.25 years of galleries at any moment. With no expiry, year 5 holds 5 years of galleries.
Step 3: pick the plan and divide
Plan price per year ÷ weddings delivered per year = hosting cost per wedding.
Divide by weddings delivered, not weddings online, because the package price you are comparing it to is charged once per wedding delivered.
FOCL Galleries plans, for the examples: Free, 3 GB, photos only. Essentials, 100 GB, $100 a year. Studio, 500 GB, $190 a year. Pro, 2 TB, $390 a year. Video is on paid plans. Monthly billing is $10, $19 and $39, which is 20 percent more over a year.
Worked example: 15 weddings a year
3 GB of photos per wedding, plus an engagement session at 0.5 GB, is 52.5 GB uploaded per year.
| Policy | Storage online at steady state | Plan | Cost per wedding |
|---|---|---|---|
| 12-month expiry, photos only | 55 to 65 GB | Essentials, $100/yr | $6.67 |
| Never expire, photos only, year 3 | 158 GB | Studio, $190/yr | $12.67 |
| 12-month expiry, plus a 2 GB highlight film each | 80 to 100 GB | Essentials, $100/yr, Studio if cleanup slips | $6.67 to $12.67 |
| 12-month expiry, highlight film plus a 10 GB ceremony edit each | 235 to 290 GB | Studio, $190/yr | $12.67 |
| Never expire, both videos, year 3 | 700 GB | Pro, $390/yr | $26.00 |
A 15-wedding photographer with an expiry policy and no video pays under $7 a wedding. A highlight film changes little, because it mostly fits in the same plan. A full ceremony edit doubles the cost. Never expiring with two videos per wedding quadruples it by year 3, and the growth does not stop there.
Worked example: 40 weddings a year
3 GB of photos plus 0.5 GB of engagement session is 140 GB uploaded per year.
| Policy | Storage online at steady state | Plan | Cost per wedding |
|---|---|---|---|
| 12-month expiry, photos only | 140 to 175 GB | Studio, $190/yr | $4.75 |
| 6-month expiry, photos only | 70 to 90 GB | Essentials, $100/yr | $2.50 |
| Never expire, photos only, year 3 | 420 GB | Studio, $190/yr | $4.75 |
| Never expire, photos only, year 5 | 700 GB | Pro, $390/yr | $9.75 |
| 12-month expiry, plus a 2 GB highlight film each | 220 to 275 GB | Studio, $190/yr | $4.75 |
| 12-month expiry, highlight film plus a 10 GB ceremony edit each | 620 to 775 GB | Pro, $390/yr | $9.75 |
| Never expire, both videos, year 3 | 1.86 TB | Pro, $390/yr, nearly full | $9.75 |
Volume makes hosting cheaper per wedding, because plan tiers are wide. But the never-expire rows show the trap: by year 4 with two videos per wedding, this photographer is past 2 TB and needs a cleanup or a second account, whatever the platform.
Expiry is the biggest lever
The plan you need is set by galleries online, and expiry is the only thing that keeps that number flat. The 40-wedding photographer with a 12-month expiry stays on the same plan for good. The same photographer with no expiry moves up a tier every 2 to 3 years to pay for galleries nobody opens. Expiry only saves money if the files actually leave the hosting after the date, on a schedule, with the couple warned in advance. How to word it and what to charge to re-host is in wedding gallery expiration policy.
Do not shorten expiry below 6 months to save money. The saving is a few dollars a wedding and the cost is re-host emails and couples who feel rushed.
Video changes the math more than anything else
A full ceremony edit is 3 to 5 times the size of the photo gallery it sits next to. Two choices keep it manageable: deliver long-form video at 1080p rather than 4K, which is about 40 percent of the size, and give video a shorter hosting window than photos if your contract allows it. In FOCL Galleries, video is measured in hours rather than gigabytes (3 on Essentials, 10 on Studio, 30 on Pro), so a full ceremony edit costs you an hour of allowance whatever its file size, and files above about 200 Mbps cannot be processed, so a delivery-bitrate export is needed anyway. Platforms that host video price it in different ways, and client gallery with video hosting compares them.
What this math leaves out
- Your time. Building and sending a gallery takes 30 to 60 minutes per wedding. At any reasonable hourly rate that is more than the hosting.
- Download and bandwidth caps. Some platforms meter what leaves the server. A 3 GB gallery downloaded by 30 guests is 90 GB of transfer. Check whether that is charged before comparing storage prices. FOCL never caps downloads or bandwidth. Others may.
- Print commissions and payment fees. A platform that takes a percentage of print sales can cost more than one with a higher subscription, if you sell prints.
- Per-gallery pricing. Some platforms charge by number of galleries or clients rather than storage, which changes the arithmetic entirely at high volume. FOCL has unlimited galleries and couples on every plan, including Free.
The number that matters
Put your hosting cost per wedding next to your package price. At $6.67 on a $3,500 package it is 0.2 percent. At $26 it is 0.7 percent. Both are smaller than the card processing fee on the deposit. Pick the platform on how it delivers, whether the couple downloads, and what it does for print sales, then set an expiry policy and let the hosting cost take care of itself. How to build the gallery into the package price is in how to charge for online galleries in your packages.
Storage is the only thing FOCL counts
Unlimited galleries and couples on every plan, an expiry date per gallery, and downloads never capped. FOCL Galleries plans run from 3 GB free to 100 GB, 500 GB and 2 TB.
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