Many people have asked me about this subject and while I did write a small 'Pricing' section in Adoptables, Basics for Adoptables Artists, the requests have not decreased so I decided to do a Journal dedicated to it.

Pricing is a tricky art because you need to balance three things, the Price/Effort ratio, the Price/Design ratio and the General Market Price.


Price/Effort Ratio
This is what you think you deserve to earn and the price that you would put on your adoptable if you didn't take into account the other two aspects. This takes into account mainly two things:
 
Time spent on the adoptable
Obviously, spending five hours on an adoptable instead of one makes the price rise. Many artists use a hourly wage to do their commission prices, so you should time yourself when you do an adoptable, at least the first few times, just to have an idea of your drawing speed. Your hourly wage should be linked to the quality of your art.

Quality of your art
Let's be honest here, not everybody is an adoptables da Vinci. The better your art quality (shadows, clean lines, correct anatomy) the higher price you can ask. If your art quality is low, you should use a hourly wage wisely. Sadly, a buyer only sees the final result, and it doesn't matter to them that you spent 7 hours to do your adopt, if the result is an unsightly blob that is priced $10.


Price/Design Ratio
Ugly fact of life, unless you have thousands of adoring watchers and you're an adoptable God, a black cat is a black cat. And no one will spend money on it simply because you used a nicer lineart or you'll give them a high resolution file. An adoptable is all about the design and a simplicistic design will not sell for a high price.

Elements to take into account for the P/R Ratio are:

Original Lineart/Base (+1)
Original Species (+1)
Design Originality (+3)

How to tell that your design is original? Well, this is mostly left to the artist's insight, but be sure that if it's a feline/canine and it has a solid colour... It's not very original.

General Market Price
This is the sworn enemy of the P/E Ratio and probably the element that drags down your adoptables' price like a stone. Because these days everyone and their best friend are doing adoptables. It's a good way to earn some extra points/cash, using your spare time to do the batches and avoiding the small hours to do commissions. And because there's a lot of competition, the prices are very low.

Your best bet is to browse through adoptables groups and find some characters that are close to yours, for Art Quality and Design, and look at the prices. Chances are they already did the pricing for you and you only need to adjust it a little, based on the differences between your P/E and P/D Ratios and theirs.

In the end, you get:

Final Price = (P/E Ratio + P/D Ratio + GMP)/3

What is written here is my own opinion and the result of my personal experience and should not be taken as The Law inscribed in Stone. (I have used an equation similar to this at the beginning of my Adoptables Account. Right now the GMP for original species has risen a little and my own P/D Ratio has slightly grown, so my prices would need a bit of re-handling. But I'm to lazy to do that right now.)

Adoptables, Basics for Adopters
Adoptables, Basics for Adoptables Artists
Adoptables Tutorial
Adoptables, Writing an Artist's Description
Adoptables, Customs
Adoptables, Design Tutorial
Adoptables, Buying Adoptables
Adoptables, Pricing
Original Species Tutorial
The Purchase Button and P2U Deviations
Adoptables, Auctions