The Artist's Guide to Pricing AI-Assisted Commissions

AI image generators like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion have become incredibly powerful tools in the digital artist's arsenal. They can accelerate ideation, create stunning textures, and help you produce work faster than ever. But this new "hybrid workflow" has created a massive challenge: how do you price a piece of art that is part human, part machine?

Clients may devalue your work, thinking "the AI did it all," while you know the real effort lies in your creative direction, curation, and final paint-over. This guide will provide a simple, data-driven framework to help you price your AI-assisted commissions with confidence and clearly communicate your value.

The Core Problem: Valuing Your Human Expertise

The biggest hurdle is overcoming the misconception that AI is a "push-button" solution. Your value is no longer just in your technical brush skills; it's in your artistic vision.

The Mistake: A client sees your stunning character concept and says, "That's amazing! What prompt did you use?" They subconsciously devalue the hours you spent crafting 50 different prompts, curating hundreds of generated images, compositing the best elements, and then spending hours in Photoshop painting over the result to create a truly unique piece.

The Fix: Shift your billing to reflect the new workflow. Your invoice should be a story that educates the client on your process. By itemizing the different stages of your work—the AI generation, the human curation, and the final polish—you make your invisible expertise visible and justifiable.

The Hybrid Pricing Model: A Framework for Your Invoice

Instead of a single, vague line item, break your pricing down into components that reflect your process. This transparency builds trust and justifies your fee. Consider these four categories:

1. Ideation & Prompt Crafting Fee (Fixed or Hourly): This covers the initial creative work: understanding the client's brief, developing the art direction, and crafting the complex prompts needed to guide the AI.
2. AI Generation & Curation Time (Hourly): This is the time spent generating hundreds of images, selecting the best options, and identifying the key elements to be used.
3. Human Artistry & Paint-Over (Your Premium Hourly Rate): This is your core value. This is the time you spend in Photoshop, Procreate, or ZBrush, compositing images, painting over details, fixing errors, and applying your unique artistic style to elevate the piece from a raw generation to a finished work of art.
4. Licensing & Usage Rights (Value-Based): The final price should also reflect how the client will use the image. A character concept for a major video game is worth far more than a personal profile picture.

Why You Must Track Your Time (Even When You're Not Painting)

This model only works if you have the data to back it up. The only way to know how much to charge for "curation" or "prompt crafting" is to know how long it actually takes you.

The Mistake: You charge a flat fee of $500 for an AI-assisted commission. You feel great until you realize you spent 2 hours on the initial call, 5 hours crafting and generating prompts, and another 10 hours on a detailed paint-over. Your 17 hours of work earned you an effective rate of less than $30/hr.

The Fix: Use a simple time tracker like FocusFlow as your internal "production log." Create a project for the commission and start the timer for every single task. Use notes to label each entry: "Prompting," "Curation," "Paint-over." You still present the client with a clean, professional invoice based on your hybrid model, but you use your internal time data to ensure your pricing is profitable. The Insights dashboard becomes your guide to understanding the true cost of your creative process, allowing you to refine your pricing for the next client.