I was at an event with Canon UK this week. They invited a lot of news and sports photographers to a hotel in South Wales and I was there to share my experience and expertise about all manner of photography and post-production topics. Inevitably conversations drift and different groups spoke about lots of elements of what we do. One short chat about software subscriptions stuck in my mind. So much so that I spent quite a lot of the drive back to Dorset thinking about it and how to put those thoughts down here in this blog post. Here goes.

I pay for the majority of the bits of software that I rely on as subscriptions. Insurances of all sorts are must-haves and I pay for websites, cloud storage and many other things that underpin my business and with that my ability to earn a living. I know that I could cut costs, cut some corners and save myself hundreds of pounds (dollars if you are reading this in the US) a year if I chose to. I already do an annual audit of those many costs and this year’s happened a couple of months ago. I am content (which is two notches under happy on this scale) with what I have and what I pay but I’m always looking to fine-tune this stuff where I can without losing things that are important to me.

Some of them are annual payments and some are monthly. Some are in addition to things that I’d pay for if I weren’t a freelance photographer and some are entirely down to the job I do and the way that I choose to do it. Here’s a list of my subscriptions and insurances;

• Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom and Creative Cloud
• Apple iCloud
• Backblaze
• Camera insurance
• Canon Content Transfer Professional app
• Canon Professional Services membership
• Car breakdown cover upgrade for full business use
• Car insurance for work use
• Dropbox Professional
• EE SIM card
• Making Tax Digital and accounting software
• Microsoft Office
• Photo Mechanic
• PhotoShelter unlimited
• Public liability insurance
• Travel insurance business upgrades
• Virgin Business broadband
• Vodafone SIM cards x 3
• Website and email package (Ionos)

There are probably more and I would love to be able to get loss of earnings cover but, sadly, my medical history makes that virtually impossible. I hope that this gives people some idea of what freelancers have to pay for before we even start to think about variable costs like bank charges or the costs of equipment and running a car. For many of my colleagues these add up to a lot of money to find each month with semi-permanent overdrafts, leased equipment and leased cars adding to the financial pressures. Lots of them pay a lot of money a year for web developers, accountancy and other professional fees and all of the extra costs that often come with them as well.

If you talk to twenty different freelance photographers and ask them to analyse their fixed overheads you will get twenty different totals – so what does it cost me? When you add it all up on an annual basis and then divide it by twelve anyway (because some are annual for the discount and some aren’t) you get a figure a shade over £300.00 per month excluding VAT. I had a conversation last year with another freelancer who leases gear, leases a car, gets his new phones on a contract and has an accountant and book-keeper on retainer. His monthly average figure is well over three times the size of mine.

There are no right or wrong answers here. You can trim the figures and choose software and services that are either free or considerably cheaper than what I like to call the ‘industry standards’. You can avoid equipment insurance, not bother to tell your car insurers what you do for a living and avoid running cloud backups of your files. I could halve my overheads in a heartbeat and hope for the best whilst using products that will do the job. I could have stuck with older cameras and even older ways of working and shaved a few more pounds from the three-year budget but at the end of the day I am paying what I am paying with my eyes wide open and a decent amount of control over those pesky overhead costs.

When it comes to buying equipment I have always tried to make a business case to myself. As a one-man-band freelancer I don’t have a manager to oversee my requests and reign-in spending. It’s down to me and I’d be the first to admit that I can be pretty inconsistent.

This is a topic of conversation that comes up regularly when two or more photographers get together. It’s yet another marker, if more were needed, that photographers really are individuals. The same set of costs don’t suit any of us but making lists and analysing should be the one thing that we all do. It’s at this point that I will, yet again, remind everyone of the best piece of photographic advice that I ever received: “If someone tells you that there’s only one way to do something in photography, don’t listen to them. They’re an idiot.”