How Much to Charge for an Art Commission

Price an art commission as estimated hours × your target hourly rate, then charge separately for extra characters, backgrounds, revisions, rush delivery, and commercial rights. The worked examples below — about $10–$30 for a sketch and $80–$200 for a full-body render — are outputs of that formula at a $20-per-hour target, not measured marketplace averages. Custom Work lets you offer clearly scoped commissions and services: you set the price, the scope and the delivery time, and followers submit a brief and pay before you start.

Two workload variables set the base price: how much of the figure you draw — bust, half-body, or full-body — and how far you render it, from rough lines to full shading. Character count, background detail, delivery speed, and usage rights each belong in a separate, named add-on rather than the base tier. You do not need a large following to take paid commissions: give clients a clear scope, fixed price, and delivery time so they know exactly what they are ordering.

If you have not set up commissions yet, how to take paid commissions as a creator or artist covers scope, payment timing, and delivery time. This guide focuses on calculating the price.

Key figures for pricing an art commission:

• Ko-fi charges creators a 5% fee on commission payments, and Ko-fi Commissions is free to get started (Ko-fi Help Center: What are Ko-fi Commissions).
• VGen charges artists a 5% service fee plus a payment processing fee, with no upfront or monthly fee (VGen Help Center: What are VGen's fees).
• Fiverr tells freelancers to factor the 20% Fiverr commission into your price (Fiverr Help Center: Fiverr Pro freelancer badge and benefits).
• Fiverr's minimum Gig starting price is $5, with higher minimums in some categories.
• Brillay's own pricing page (Brillay pricing) states: No monthly fee, you only pay a small platform fee when you get paid. 8% platform fee when a follower pays for work, 5% platform fee on tips and goals. Card processing is separate.
• Stripe's standard U.S. online-card rate is 2.9% + $0.30 per successful charge (Stripe pricing).
• A commissioned illustration is a work made for hire only if it fits one of nine statutory categories and both parties sign a written agreement (U.S. Copyright Office, Circular 30), so copyright normally stays with the artist and a commercial license is a separately priced grant.
• On Brillay, each commission tier is one priced request on your own page: the price, the scope and the delivery window are published, the brief is collected at checkout, and the follower pays upfront by card as a guest, so the work arrives already paid for and already specified. The followers you already have are the audience — there is no ranking to climb.

How should artists calculate a commission price?

Multiply the hours a clearly defined deliverable takes by the hourly amount you want to earn, then price everything outside that definition as a named extra. After delivery, divide what you were paid by the hours you actually worked and raise any tier whose real hourly return falls below your target.

Base price = estimated work hours × target hourly earnings

Use this reproducible process:

1. Define the deliverable: Record the crop, render level, character count, background, file format, usage rights, change policy, and delivery time.
2. Estimate the labor: Use timed examples from your own completed work whenever possible.
3. Choose a target hourly amount: Set an earnings target appropriate to your costs, experience, and available capacity.
4. Calculate the base price: Multiply estimated hours by the target hourly amount.
5. Add out-of-scope work: Price extra characters, detailed backgrounds, rush delivery, extra deliverables, and expanded rights separately.
6. Validate after delivery: Divide the amount earned by the actual hours worked and revise any tier that falls below your target.

Build the menu around two primary variables:

• Crop: Define whether the order includes a bust, half-body, full-body figure, chibi, icon, or reference sheet with multiple views.
• Render level: Specify whether the buyer receives a rough sketch, clean lineart, flat color, cel shading, or full painterly rendering.

Your own timed work provides the most relevant input for this calculation. If a $90 tier takes six hours, its gross hourly return is $15 before payment and platform fees; if it takes three hours, its gross hourly return is $30 before fees. Record actual production time so that each tier reflects your workflow.

What prices does the hours × rate formula produce?

At a $20-per-hour target, the formula produces about $10–$30 for a sketch, $20–$50 for a flat-color bust, $45–$110 for a rendered half-body, $80–$200 for a full-body render, and $150–$400+ for a reference sheet or multi-character scene. Every figure in the table is estimated hours × $20, shown so you can substitute your own numbers.

Every cell is reproducible arithmetic: a full-body render estimated at 4–10 hours prices at $80–$200 because 4 × $20 = $80 and 10 × $20 = $200. Change the hourly target and every row moves with it — at a $35-per-hour target the same 4–10 hour full-body render prices at $140–$350.

We did not find a public, methodologically documented dataset of average art commission prices while researching this page in September 2026, so treat any single quoted "market rate" with caution. One published pricing reference that does exist for illustration is the Graphic Artists Guild's Handbook: Pricing & Ethical Guidelines, whose 17th edition runs 504 pages and lists at $54.95; Penguin Random House records that edition's publication date as November 4, 2025.

These ranges become useful only after the deliverable is defined. Before pricing, scope the request by specifying character count, crop, rendering, background, file format, usage rights, and delivery time.

If you draw animals, how much to charge for a pet portrait addresses that niche separately because digital work and traditional paint can involve different labor and material costs.

You can publish each tier as a separate offer through Custom Work, with its price and scope written down before followers pay.

What do commission platforms charge, and how does that change your price?

Published platform fees set the gap between your list price and your take-home: Ko-fi charges a 5% fee on commission payments, VGen charges artists 5% plus a payment processing fee, Fiverr withholds a 20% commission, and Brillay charges 8% when a follower pays for work and 5% on tips and goals. Each platform documents payment processing separately, as noted below.

• Ko-fi charges a 5% fee on commission payments, and getting started with Ko-fi Commissions is free; Ko-fi states that PayPal and Stripe charge their normal processing fees on top.
• Ko-fi Gold costs $12 per month and removes Ko-fi's 5% service fee (Ko-fi Help Center: What is Ko-fi Gold), so Gold breaks even at $240 per month in commission sales because $12 ÷ 5% = $240.
• VGen charges artists a 5% service fee plus a payment processing fee and no upfront or monthly fee.
• VGen states that an artist must hold at least $50 USD in the VGen Wallet before a payout can be processed (VGen Help Center: Set up your payouts); that threshold affects when earnings can be withdrawn, not how low an artist can price an individual commission.
• Fiverr sets a $5 minimum starting price for a Gig, with higher minimums in some categories.
• Fiverr instructs freelancers to factor the 20% Fiverr commission into your price, and a Fiverr Pro Gig can be priced up to $20,000, with custom offers up to $50,000, so a $100 Fiverr order leaves the freelancer $80.
• Fiverr withholds that commission automatically: "This commission is automatically withheld before your revenue is released".
• Fiverr also charges the client a service fee of 5.5% of the purchase amount plus $3.50 on orders under $200 (Fiverr Help Center: Paying for orders, extras or custom offers), so a $120 Fiverr commission costs the client about $130.10 while returning $96 to the artist.
• Brillay charges 8% when a follower pays for work and 5% on tips and goals, with no monthly fee; Stripe sends your earnings to your bank (How Brillay works). Followers pay upfront as guests when they send the request, so the request arrives already paid for, and your bank details stay with Stripe rather than with the buyer.

Using each platform's own published rate, a $120 full-render commission returns $114 on Ko-fi's 5% commission fee, $114 on VGen's 5% service fee, $110.40 on Brillay's 8% fee, and $96 on Fiverr's 20% commission before each venue's separately documented payment processing. Set your list price against the venue you actually sell in rather than a rate you saw quoted elsewhere.

How much should artists add for characters, backgrounds, or commercial use?

Define what the base tier covers — one character, a plain background, personal-use rights, and one final delivery — then price extra characters, detailed backgrounds, rush work, and broader rights as separate Custom Work offers. VGen's help center documents the two formats artists use for a usage upgrade: a fixed amount, or a percentage added to the base price.

Licensing and rights, from the primary sources:

• VGen's three standard usage licenses are Personal, Commercial: Content, and Commercial: Merchandising.
• VGen states that use beyond the included license "is available for an additional charge, which you can set as a fixed amount or a percentage added to your base price", so a percentage-of-base commercial surcharge is a supported format — but the percentage itself is yours to set, not an industry standard.
• A specially ordered or commissioned work is a work made for hire only if it falls within one of nine enumerated categories and both parties sign a written agreement (U.S. Copyright Office), so an ordinary character illustration usually leaves copyright with the artist.
• A transfer of copyright ownership "generally must be made in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed or the owner's authorized agent" (U.S. Copyright Office, Circular 1), which is why a commercial upgrade should name the permitted uses in writing instead of implying them.

Every percentage in that table is an artist-defined choice illustrated with arithmetic, not an observed industry rate:

• Extra characters: Price the second figure from your own recorded time. If a second character takes nearly as long as the first, a surcharge closer to 100% of the base price matches the labor better than 50%.
• Backgrounds: Include only the background promised in the listing. A gradient, a prop-based scene, and a fully illustrated environment have different scopes, so define a price or quoting rule for each.
• Commercial use: Price the actual rights requested — exclusivity, merchandise, and distribution reach differ sharply — and write them into the order rather than granting open-ended commercial use by default, consistent with the signed-writing requirement in Circular 1 (U.S. Copyright Office).
• Rush work: Set a rush fee when an accelerated deadline requires you to reorder existing work. State both the normal delivery time and the faster window covered by the surcharge.

A visible rule such as "+$60 per extra character" or "+50% for commercial use" gives the buyer a calculable total. Adjust the number whenever recorded labor or licensing scope shows the add-on is underpriced.

What do artists keep after Stripe and Brillay fees?

Stripe's standard U.S. online-card rate is 2.9% + $0.30 per successful charge and Brillay's platform fee on paid work is 8% of the listed price (tips and goals carry 5%), so a $90 commission nets about $79.89. The estimates below apply each published rate to the list price; card type, country, and currency can push processing higher.

Stripe handles payment processing and payouts through Brillay. Stripe's standard U.S. online-card rate is 2.9% + $0.30 per successful transaction (Stripe pricing). Stripe adds 1.5% for international cards and a further 1% when currency conversion is required, so a $120 commission paid on a converted international card can cost roughly $3.00 more in processing than the same order on a domestic card.

For a listed commission price of P, use this planning calculation:

• Stripe processing estimate: P × 2.9% + $0.30
• Brillay paid-work fee: P × 8%
• Estimated net: P − Stripe processing − Brillay fee

This model applies each published rate to the listed price rather than stacking one fee on the other's remainder. Confirm the exact deduction order on a real transaction in your dashboard before quoting a guaranteed net.

Using Stripe's U.S. online-card rate of 2.9% + $0.30 (Stripe pricing) and Brillay's 8% platform fee, a $90 commission has an estimated net of $79.89.

Pricing backwards from a target take-home

To hit a take-home target instead of a list price, invert the two published rates. With Brillay's 8% fee on paid work (5% applies to tips and goals) and Stripe's 2.9% + $0.30, $0.891 of every listed dollar reaches you because 1 − 0.08 − 0.029 = 0.891, which gives:

List price = (target hourly earnings × hours + $0.30) ÷ 0.891

An artist targeting $25 per hour on a five-hour full-body render must list it at about $141, because (5 × $25 + $0.30) ÷ 0.891 = $140.63, to clear roughly $125 after Brillay's 8% fee on the commission and Stripe's 2.9% + $0.30.

These figures are planning estimates rather than exact payout statements. Check the actual transaction in your dashboard because card type, country, and currency can affect Stripe's processing cost.

The fixed $0.30 processing component represents a larger share of a small transaction: on Fiverr's $5 Gig minimum, a $0.30 fixed fee is 6% of the order before any percentage fee applies. Keeping the simplest tier at $10 or more leaves more of the price for labor.

When should artists raise their commission prices?

Raise prices on evidence from your own queue and time records rather than a follower count: slots that fill faster than you can deliver, tiers whose actual hours exceed the estimate, unpriced change requests, and buyers who consistently order the most complex version of a tier. Test one tier at a time.

VGen's help center confirms that artists can cap demand directly, limiting availability with commission slots and timers alongside OPEN and CLOSED service statuses — closing slots and raising the price are the two standard levers when demand outruns capacity.

Consider testing a higher price when:

• Slots fill faster than you can sustainably deliver. If demand consistently exceeds the number of commissions you can complete within the promised delivery time, test a higher price or open fewer slots.
• Actual hours exceed the estimate. If full renders routinely require more time than the menu allows, increase the price or narrow the included scope.
• Change requests consume unpriced time. Define what counts as outside scope and charge for work beyond the original deliverable.
• Buyers repeatedly request the hardest version of a tier. Elaborate clothing, props, detailed backgrounds, and additional characters should become explicit add-ons when the base price does not cover them.
• Demand has increased while capacity remains fixed. More buyers competing for the same number of sustainable slots creates an opportunity to test a higher rate.

You do not need to change the entire menu at once. Raise one tier, track demand and the time it takes you to finish each commission, and compare the result with the previous price. Existing customers can decide whether the updated scope still suits them, while new buyers see the current rate before ordering.

How do artists set up commissions on Brillay?

Publish each crop and render level as its own named offer with a price, delivery time, and one-time delivery, then list extra characters, detailed backgrounds, rush work, and expanded rights as separate options. Clients pay upfront and you deliver later; there is no follower minimum, and Brillay charges 8% when a follower pays for work and 5% on tips and goals.

With Custom Work, artists publish one defined commission with the price, scope and delivery time written down. Clients pay by card as guests, and each order is delivered once as one package, with a support conversation on the order if the follower needs help afterwards.

You can decline a request.

Put one Brillay link in your bio for Custom Work and your other offers, and receive payouts in 41 supported countries. Stripe handles payment processing and payouts for Brillay orders.

Frequently asked questions

How much should I add for each extra character?

There is no published industry rate for an extra character; price it from your own recorded hours. A common artist-set format is a percentage of the base price — a 50% surcharge adds $60 to a $120 full render, for a $180 total — and VGen's help center confirms that a percentage added to the base price is a supported way to structure such an upgrade.

Should I price by the hour or use flat tiers?

Show buyers flat prices for clearly defined deliverables, but calculate those prices from your hours. Divide each tier's price by the time it actually takes: a $90 tier that takes six hours returns $15 per hour before fees, and after Brillay's 8% fee for paid work (tips and goals are charged 5%) and Stripe's 2.9% + $0.30 that $90 order nets $79.89, or $13.32 per hour. If the resulting hourly earnings are below your target, raise the price, reduce the scope, or do both.

How much more should I charge for commercial rights?

No universal licensing rate exists, so price the specific rights requested. VGen separates commercial use into Commercial: Content and Commercial: Merchandising, with the upgrade charged as a fixed amount or a percentage added to the base price. Put the permitted uses in writing: the U.S. Copyright Office states a transfer of copyright ownership "generally must be made in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed" (Circular 1).

Should I collect payment before starting?

With Custom Work, clients pay upfront and you deliver later. For a large, multi-week project, milestone payments are an option some marketplaces support directly: VGen states that artists can split a commission payment in any way using its split-by-milestones feature. How to take paid commissions explains deposits and milestones in more detail.

Ready to set your prices and start taking commissions? Create your free Brillay page.