#ProtectTheSessionFee · TLDR: I went RV shopping from my desk, watched an entire industry tell me its prices were fiction, and realized we are doing the same thing to ourselves. Your session fee is never free and never publicly discounted. Any flexibility happens privately. Urgency comes from limited dates and limited features, never from lowered prices.
Every 2026 model on that lot was marked down between $40,000 and $90,000 off the manufacturer’s suggested price. Automatically. Before I clicked anything, before I gave anybody my name, before a salesperson said hello, before I asked a single question about financing.
I never left my desk. If you’re my friend on Facebook you already know we bought a 40 foot RV to travel in and advertise Seven Rubies on, and with what diesel costs now, pulling that thing across the country doesn’t make sense. So I’ve been looking at used camper van conversions, which is how I ended up on an RV dealer’s website here in Baton Rouge this week. I wasn’t shopping new. I only wanted to see what new costs, so I’d know whether the used prices I had been looking at were actually the deal I thought they were.
I did not make it past the first listing.
The number that ended it
About thirty seconds in, I looked at Charlton and said, “How do these people expect me to take them seriously if they’re discounting their MSRP 50 percent or more right there on the site?”
Because that wasn’t a negotiation. That wasn’t a reward for walking onto the lot or a clearance I had to qualify for. Nobody had learned my name. That’s the price they show a stranger who has money to spend.
So I checked another dealer. Same thing. Then another. I found 2026 models sitting at $100,000 off. On the big coaches, the bus type ones, the listings went up to $350,000 off. Somewhere around the fourth site a very simple thought arrived, and it hasn’t left since. (I still have not priced a camper van. Lol.)
If it’s worth $80,000 less than you told me it was worth, you were never telling me the truth about what it was worth.
I will not buy a new RV. Not this year, not in five years, not when we can pay for one comfortably. That’s not a budget decision. Those companies handed me a reason to distrust the entire category, and I took it!
They didn’t lose one sale, they lost a buyer
Here’s the part I keep coming back to. That first dealer didn’t just fail to sell me a van. They convinced me that new RVs aren’t worth their asking price anywhere, from anyone. I have not met the other manufacturers. I have not sat inside their models. I already don’t believe them.
One discount, published in public, repriced an entire industry in my head in about ninety seconds. And the wild part is that the dealer almost certainly thought they were being generous. They thought that number was a gift. What it actually did was tell me the first number was fiction, and once a buyer learns the first number is fiction, she never trusts a first number in that industry again.
Sitting there in our garage, where we work and where we make the big decisions, something I’ve been trying to explain for a long time finally came out in words anybody can understand. This is the entire Clarity Marketing mindset in one line.
We are a LUXURY market. Not a discount market.
A luxury market doesn’t put its own price on sale, because the price is part of the product. The moment you mark it down in public, you’ve told everybody what you actually are, and they will believe you.
Now say it in boudoir
“Session fee normally $650, this week only $199.”
You know that post. It runs every January, every slow August, every time a photographer opens the calendar and doesn’t like what they see. I understand exactly where it comes from. A light month is terrifying when studio rent is due on the first and it doesn’t care how you feel.
But read that post the way a client reads it. She doesn’t think “lucky me.” She thinks, so it was never $650. She now believes she knows your real number, and your real number is $199. She also believes she knows the industry’s real number, because you just told her what the markup looks like.
Then three things happen, and all three of them are permanent.
She books at $199 and prices your work at $199 forever. When you come back at full fee, she doesn’t experience it as your regular rate returning. She experiences it as you raising your price on her by $451.
She tells her friends what she paid. She is proud of the deal, so of course she does! Now the number she’s quoting around town isn’t your fee, it’s your sale, and it’s doing your marketing for you at a rate you can’t survive on.
She waits. If you discounted once, you’ll discount again. The client who would have booked in March at full fee now sits on her hands until the next sale, because you taught her that patience pays better than commitment.
I’ve seen our version of it from the interstate
Charlton and I put close to 30,000 miles on the road this year visiting studios and working trade shows. That is a LOT of hours in a vehicle, and when you spend that many hours moving through other people’s towns, the ads stop being work and start being scenery. One after another, in the order they show up.
Some of the studios I passed belong to people I know and love! Plenty of them belong to people I had never heard of in my life. And they were all running the same ad.
Different wrapper, same machine. A giveaway. A birthday promotion. A session for people with tattoos. A session for healthcare workers. A contest, a nomination, a spot that’s free if you claim it this week. The session fee is waived or cut to almost nothing, so the client commits to nothing, and the real money is expected to come from the product order instead. A free front door, with the actual number waiting somewhere behind it.
I have worked for and built campaigns for studios all across the country, which is my whole background before Seven Rubies. Working across that many different businesses is what taught me there’s no one right way to run one, and which pieces a studio cannot run without anyway. The session fee is one of them. I believed that long before I ever pulled up that dealer’s site.
So the driving didn’t teach me this, it confirmed it, one town at a time, with nobody presenting me a slide and nobody trying to sell me anything. Many dozens of markets in a row will show you what one market never can.
And this is what got me, mile after mile. Almost nobody was advertising the thing that actually makes them special! Somebody out there has a half acre flower field and a greenhouse in her own backyard with a lake behind it, like Petal and Pose Boudoir in Medford, Wisconsin, or a set nobody else in the state has built, or a way of talking to a nervous client that people should drive three hours for. The ad running for that studio is 40 over 40, same as the studio two towns back. The most remarkable thing in the building never makes it into the marketing, and it isn’t because these people aren’t brilliant. It’s because nothing in the campaign they were handed had a slot for the thing that makes them THEM.
Market the thing only you have. That’s the whole job, and a giveaway can’t do it for you.
Yes, it works, and that’s exactly the problem
That funnel works. People are running it successfully right now, and running it well. There are studios paying their rent with it this month, and I’m not going to stand here and tell them their bank statement is imaginary!
But it works the way that RV lot’s discount works. It moves a unit today and it spends something that doesn’t grow back. Every time a free session fee runs in a town, that town learns a little more that the session fee is theater. And the photographer running it can never stop, because the moment they charge normally the calendar goes quiet. That’s not a marketing strategy at that point, it’s a subscription you pay with your own pricing.
And think about what a free entry does to the conversation you have to have anyway. Most of us quote a typical spend on the discovery call, before anybody books. That system works, and it works because the person on the other end of it already decided she was buying photographs. A client who paid a real session fee has qualified herself. A client who claimed a free spot has qualified nothing, and somebody still has to walk her from free to a number with commas in it. That gap is where the pressure comes from. The pressure isn’t a character flaw in the photographer, it’s a design flaw in the funnel.
Then there’s what it costs to run, which almost nobody puts on the spreadsheet. A free offer doesn’t bring you buyers, it brings you volume. Hundreds of entries, hundreds of leads, and most of those hands went up because the word free was in the sentence. You pay for those leads twice. Once in the ad spend that collected them, and again in the hours you spend calling, texting, following up and sitting on consults with people who were never going to spend money with you.
Spending your time and your money scooping up hundreds of leads who will never book you doesn’t make sense. When you look straight at it, it stops feeling like a strategy and starts feeling like a treadmill somebody sold you a ticket for. Twenty people who understood the price before they ever contacted you are worth more than a list of a thousand who came for the giveaway, and they’re worth more on the calendar, in the bank and at nine at night when you’re still answering messages!
The pool is shared, whether we like it or not
Clients search close to home. They search by their city, their suburb, the studio their coworker used. That means you’re not advertising into a private room. You are advertising into a pool that every photographer in your area is standing in.
So when one studio publishes a fire sale, every other studio in that zip code has to answer for it. They get the consult that opens with “I saw somebody doing this for $199, why are you so much more?” And now a photographer who has never discounted a day in their life is spending the first ten minutes of every call defending a price that was completely reasonable until somebody else’s flash sale walked into the room.
That part is a community decision more than a business decision. A public discount isn’t only a promotion. It’s a statement about what our work is worth, made on behalf of all of us, by one of us, without asking the rest of us.
Where the playbook came from
This next part is nobody’s fault and it’s still true.
Nobody invented that ad in their own town. It came in a box. The education side of this industry sells the same build over and over, often for $5,000 or more, and what you receive for the money is a system that has already been implemented word for word by everybody else who bought it. Free or discounted front end, pressure applied wherever the product order happens, big back end. That’s what’s being taught, at scale, to rooms full of photographers from all over the country who then go home and run it in their own markets.
A TON of us came up through those programs, including myself. Many people made their first $100K because of the structure and the easy to implement nature of those very necessary courses. We all started somewhere. When you’re starting out and you don’t yet know how to price, how to sell, how to run a consult or how to build an offer, buying the whole thing from somebody who already figured it out makes complete sense. For a lot of studios, that first program is the reason the studio exists at all.
Where it stops working is the fifth one. And the tenth. You can’t keep buying the same shape over and over and expect a result that fits your business, because the shape was never yours to begin with. What you needed in year one was a structure. What you need now is a difference, and those two things don’t come in the same box!
So if you paid for the program and did exactly what it told you to do, you did your part. Nobody sold you that build with a warning label on the side.
But picture the weekend coming up in your own town. Four studios within driving distance of you, running the same hook, the same free offer and the same script, in front of the same client scrolling on her couch on a Sunday night. Picture her seeing all four. What does she come away believing it’s worth? What does she decide to do next? Her next step is the only one that counts here.
A cookie cutter can’t give you an advantage. It can only give you the average, and the average keeps dropping because everybody is buying the same cutter.
What is worth paying for is a build that’s actually yours. Your story, your market, your clients, your numbers, your pricing, your voice. A custom build costs what it costs because somebody has to look at your specific situation, and it can’t be resold to the studio forty minutes up the road, which is the entire point. If you’re going to spend $5,000 on your business, spend it on something only you will be running.
Nobody was ever buying the price
Price was never what she was buying.
She isn’t comparison shopping a new appliance. She is choosing the human being she’s going to get undressed in front of. She is buying safety, and being seen, and the way she felt when she read your words at two in the morning. She is buying the version of herself she thinks she will meet in your studio!
None of that gets more attractive when it goes on sale. It gets less attractive, because cheap and intimate don’t sit well together in anybody’s mind. A discount doesn’t make her want it more, it makes her wonder what’s wrong with it.
Your fee is justified by who you are, what you’ve survived, how you run a room, and what your clients walk out believing about themselves. That’s the story to market. Not the number, and definitely not the number crossed out.
Why it’s us saying this
Charlton and I agree on most things, because we make decisions the same way. We look at whether something holds up logically, and if it doesn’t, we don’t do it, no matter how many people are doing it. This one isn’t close.
Between the two of us and roughly 30,000 miles of looking at this industry from the road, we didn’t arrive here on a hunch. We arrived here from the pattern. And the pattern says exactly what the RV lot said. An industry that publicly discounts its own product teaches its buyers to never believe its prices again.
Flexibility is fine, publishing it is not
None of this means you can never be generous, or never work with somebody who is stretching to get there. It means keep it off the internet.
Payment plans, a quiet arrangement with a client who is going through something, a seat you offer a nurse or a survivor because your heart said so: all of that is yours to do, PRIVATELY, one human to another. Nobody is harmed by a kindness that isn’t published!
When the calendar looks thin, add instead of subtract. Put more into the offer, not less onto the price. A second look, a wardrobe piece, a print credit, an album upgrade, a longer session, a friend who comes along. Give her a reason the yes is worth more this month without ever teaching her that your work is worth less.
And if you need urgency, make it about scarcity of you, not scarcity of price. Limited dates and limited features. One weekend. A set you’re only shooting once. A wardrobe piece that goes back in the closet in October. A flower field and open water that only line up for a few months a year. Your time and your sets genuinely are finite. Your value is NOT supposed to be.
Pick one of those levers, not both. When you limit the dates and drop the price in the same offer, you’ve spent everything you had in a single move. If it fills, you never learn which half did the work. If it doesn’t fill, you’re standing there with nothing left to pull, and the only thing louder than an offer that just failed is a bigger one, which is exactly how a studio ends up giving the session away entirely.
Scarcity you can run all year, because your dates really are finite and next month brings new ones. A discount can only be repeated by going lower. Keep price in reserve, quietly, for the private conversation with the one client who needs it. That way, when you’re in a bind, you still have somewhere to turn.
What our work is worth
The rule is short enough to keep in your head. Your session fee is never free and never publicly discounted. Any flexibility happens privately, one client at a time. Urgency comes from limited dates and limited features, not lowered prices. And when the calendar is thin you add value instead of cutting the fee.
I know what those campaigns cost to run. I know how good it feels when one of them fills a slow week. I know how hard it is to hold your number in a quiet month. And I know what a few years of public discounting teaches a whole town, which is the part that never makes it onto anybody’s spreadsheet.
Seven Rubies has not solved this yet. Most photographers I meet still feel like every lead in their city is one somebody else might take first, and that instinct isn’t stupid. It’s what happens when everybody is fishing the same pond with the same bait.
So no, we’re not there yet. What Seven Rubies is building toward is a community of photographers who have decided our work is worth what we say it’s worth, and who would rather send a client to a colleague than teach her to wait for a sale. So price your work like it’s worth it, because it is. Tell your story. And go browse the studios for a few minutes, not to see who is doing it right, but to see how completely unalike they all are. Every one of them has something nobody else has! That’s the thing worth advertising, and it’s the one thing a discount can never copy.
If you want to be somewhere that celebrates you for exactly that, come join us. Seven Rubies was built to make the photographer the reason a client books, which means your story, your sets, your way of running a room, the whole reason somebody should drive three hours to you. Not a coupon. You. Come be in a room full of people who will know you by what only you offer, and who will say so out loud where your clients can hear it!