Thirty images, written notes.€140. Seven days.
The Pixieset link arrives with “would love your honest opinion”. You open it on a Sunday, you see the sequencing problem in the first six frames and a colour shift in the last ten, and you either write it up for free or let it sit. This is the same hour with a price, a seven-day window and a refund if you miss it. Around it: a live edit-along for the people who want to watch you work, a shoot-inquiry pipeline so client work stops living in DMs, one RAW a month for the list, and a small critique group with a monthly call. The shoots themselves stay where they are.
Free to start. You keep 80%. Reviews you don't reach refund themselves at the deadline.
Refunded automatically if there's no reply by Sunday 5 Oct, 20:00
The form they fill in
instead of the DM.
A gallery link, the genre with the one-year goal, and what they want you to be honest about. Links, not uploads, so thirty RAWs never sit in anyone's inbox. The €20 single-image tier catches the “just this one” messages. Cap the full review at four a week with the spots counter and the form closes itself when the season does not.
Start from the portfolio templateFour scores and
a cut list.
Four dimensions, a score each, one sentence of evidence, and the cut: which frames go, which order the rest run in, and the one thing to shoot for next month. Written in the inbox within the week. It is what makes €140 defensible, what they show their second-shooter, and what makes a dispute almost impossible: the work is on the page, dated, within the window.
Next month: one story in 12 frames, no details. €112 to your balance
Five products,
switched on in this order.
Client shoots at €500–5,000 stay on your contracts and invoices; a 20% take on a wedding would be a bad deal and we say so. The teaching, the reviews and the inquiry pipeline are what you switch on here.
- 1Day one · Forms & Requests
Portfolio review, up to 30 images €140 · 7 days
Gallery link, genre and goal, one honest question. Four scores and a cut list within seven days or an automatic refund. Single-image tier €20 in three days. Cap the weekly volume; a review set is an hour.
- 2Week two · Bookings
Live edit-along €200 · 90 min
Google Meet with screen share. Intake: three RAWs sent ahead, Lightroom or Capture One, what they want the edit to look like. Reminders at 24 h and 1 h, your cancellation policy enforced.
- 3Week two · Leads & CRM
Shoot inquiry → quote → deposit pipeline free
Date, location, budget band, how they found you. Contacts land in the CRM tagged by genre; the pipeline runs inquiry → quote → deposit → shot → delivered. Email the segment when autumn mini-session dates open. No Stripe needed to publish it.
- 4Week four · Newsletter
Monthly RAW edit-along €5 / month
One RAW a month: the file and the before-and-after free, the step-by-step edit and a member critique behind the €5 tier. Presets are delivered inside the issue, not sold as downloads.
- 5Week six · Community
Critique group, monthly call €10 / month
Discord with a weekly image thread, a business channel for pricing and quotes, and one 90-minute group critique call a month. Yearly plan on, cap at 60 so everyone gets on screen.
October — one RAW, two edits, and why the sky is lying to you
Backlit couple, 16:40, ISO 1600, the sky two stops over. Download link (valid 30 days), plus the camera and lens so you can match it.
My straight-out-of-camera frame next to the delivered edit. Look at the sky first, then the skin: fixing one breaks the other unless you do them in this order.
Screen recording, 14 minutes: the mask on the sky, the two curve points that keep the skin warm, the export settings a printer will not ruin. The preset as an .xmp inside the issue.
One image from the critique group with my notes: the crop, the moment a second earlier, and why the frame works despite the hand in the corner.
Autumn mini-sessions open on the 12th for the list first. Two edit-along slots left this month · applyform.app/c/lea-frames
What the monthly issue
actually contains.
One RAW, one problem, one edit. The file and the before-and-after are free, which is what gets it shared in the Facebook groups. The step-by-step recording and the member critique are the paid part, which is what gets it renewed. The dates at the end are the only marketing in it, and they go to the list before Instagram.
A working educator in this niche makes roughly three quarters of their income from services and a quarter from subscriptions. The letter is the quarter; the reviews and the edit-alongs are the rest.
A critique group
with a monthly call.
Group critiques already sell at $30–75 a seat for ninety minutes with three to six photographers. A €10 Discord with one such call a month is the same thing as a subscription, plus a weekly thread that keeps people posting between calls. ApplyForm grants and revokes the role as members pay and cancel; you run the rhythm. Anything longer than a three-sentence critique becomes a €20 single-image form.
- MondayOne-image thread
Each member posts one frame. Critique two others in three sentences before you post yours. You reply to three.
- ThursdayBusiness channel
Pricing, quotes, contracts, the inquiry that went quiet. The channel where the €1,800-to-€3,000 conversation happens.
- MonthlyGroup critique call, 90 min
Six images on screen, sequencing and colour discussed live. Recorded to the archive; the reason people stay past month two.
- MonthlyAssignment
One brief on the first: “one story in twelve frames, no details”. Results go in the Monday thread at month end.
Numbers from
the market.
A working European educator's list prices: €150 written, €250 with a sixty-minute live session. €140 and a €200 edit-along sit just under both.
Thirty minutes at $50–100, niche-specific 45–60 minutes at $100–200, commercial or editorial with written action items at $200–400. Price on the outcome, not the time.
That is the community: one such call a month inside a €10 subscription, with the thread that keeps people posting in between.
About €50,000 from commissions and workshops and €15,000 from subscriptions in twelve months. The letter and the group are the 23; the reviews and edit-alongs are the 77.
HoneyBook's Starter list price rose 89% in February 2025. The inquiry pipeline here costs nothing until money moves through it.
Five to seven calls and critique videos over three to twelve months. Above the caps here by design; the €140 review is the first conversation, and the mentorship is quoted on the call.
Market figures from published industry and platform data, September 2026, rounded. Your prices, volume and retention will differ.
“My real income
is the shoots.”
It is, and it stays where it is. The inquiry form is free, the pipeline is free, and the quote, the contract and the balance run the way they run today. What moves here is the part that currently has no price: the review, the edit-along, the group, the list. If HoneyBook or Studio Ninja already runs your contracts, keep it; the inquiry pipeline here is the free front door, not a replacement.
The photographer does. Every submission carries terms the buyer accepts before paying: they keep copyright, you get a limited licence to look and comment, and the files are deleted after the window closes. Nothing uploaded is used to train anything, and the form takes gallery links, so nothing needs uploading at all.
Which is why the review form takes a gallery link, not files, and the edit-along asks for three RAWs ahead of the call by link. The monthly letter is one RAW, hosted by you, with a download link that expires.
Correct: wedding season is shoot season and education sells in winter. Cap the form at four a week in season and raise it in November. The seven-day window and the automatic refund mean a busy weekend never turns into a dispute.
Reviews, edit-alongs
and inquiries. One inbox.
Tell the agent your Instagram or YouTube handle. It reads your work, proposes the review, the edit-along and the inquiry pipeline with prices from your genre, and sets them up when you create the account.