Time + Materials Pricing Explained

Time plus materials calculates what the piece actually cost you to make: hours worked at your hourly rate, plus the money you spent on supplies, plus a share of your overhead costs, multiplied by a growth factor.

Formula: (Hours × Hourly Rate) + Materials Cost + Overhead Per Piece, then × Growth Multiplier = Final Price

This is the most honest method because it directly answers the question most artists are afraid to ask: did I actually make money on this piece?

For labor-intensive work... detailed paintings, pieces that took significantly longer than your average, complex commission work... this number tends to be higher than the size-based methods. When it is, that gap is usually accurate. The size-based methods cannot see how long something took. Time plus materials can.

This method is especially useful for custom commissions, where time and materials vary more than they do for a consistent body of work. Running commissions through time plus materials prevents the situation where a complex, long commission prices the same as a standard piece at the same size.

Hourly rate, overhead, and the growth multiplier all come from your profile settings, but you can override them per-calculation without changing your defaults.