Pricing bands

This page explains how Unpinched prices images, what it costs to submit, what control you have over the band your work appears in, and the trade-offs between bands. It is aimed at photographers thinking about submitting.

At a glance

Every accepted image is sold in a limited edition of one hundred numbered licences.
Each edition sits in one of five bands — A, B, C, D, or E. Band A is entry-level, Band E is the highest.
The platform assesses each submission and assigns a ceiling band. You can choose to sell at any band from A up to that ceiling, but not higher.
Submission costs tokens. The exact number depends on the band you choose to sell at.
Submission tokens are non-refundable, whether the image is accepted or not.

The current pricing schedule, including token costs and licence prices, is on the pricing page.

How a band is assigned

When you submit an image, Unpinched analyses it. Our model assesses:

Quality. Technical execution, composition, light, processing, presentation. Whether the image holds up at the resolution required by editorial and commercial publishers.
Subject and context. What the image is of, what it might be used for, how distinctive it is. Two technically similar images can sit at different bands if one has stronger licensing potential than the other.
Authorial signal. Whether the image suggests a photographer with a developing or recognisable style, rather than a one-off success.

The analysis produces a ceiling band — the highest band at which we believe this image should be sold. The reasoning is recorded against the submission and is visible to you in your dashboard.

We are deliberately not publishing the exact thresholds. They will move as the catalogue grows and as we learn what works.

Your choice within the ceiling

We assign the ceiling. You choose the band.

If your image is assessed at Band D, you may price it at A, B, C, or D. You may not price it at E.

The choice is locked at acceptance. Once your edition is published you cannot change the band, even before the first sale. Early buyers in any edition pay the lowest price; they need to be able to trust that what they bought won't be undercut by a later decision.

Why might you choose to price below your ceiling?

Faster sell-out. A lower band attracts more buyers. If you would rather see your work in circulation than wait for a higher price, price lower.
Wider reach. Editorial publishers and small studios can afford lower-band work that they might not commit to at Band D or E.
Building a body of work. Early in your career, several sold-out lower-band editions can be more valuable than one slow Band E.

Why might you price at your ceiling?

Maximum receipts per edition. A Band E edition that sells out returns five times as much as a Band A edition.
Signal of intent. Pricing at your ceiling tells collectors and publishers that you intend to be in the upper bracket.
Image-specific scarcity. Some images are once-in-a-career — they deserve the strongest pricing the platform supports.

The registry records both the assessed ceiling and the chosen band. A "Ceiling D, sold at A" entry is a real signal to buyers: they know they bought above their price point.

The within-edition escalator

Within every edition, the licence price rises in four steps:

Licence number	Price multiplier
1 – 20	× 1 (base)
21 – 50	× 2
51 – 80	× 4
81 – 100	× 8

Early buyers pay the base price for the band. By the last twenty licences they are paying eight times that. The escalator is the same shape in every band — what differs is the base price.

This is how editions self-discover their market level: a strong image sells through quickly at its base price, gets to the higher tranches, and ends a much more valuable position. A weaker image may not reach the escalator at all.

What it costs to submit

Submitting an image costs tokens. The submission cost scales with the band you choose to sell at — not the ceiling we assess for you. A Band A submission costs one token; a Band E submission costs five.

Submission tokens are non-refundable, regardless of outcome:

If your submission is accepted, the tokens are spent.
If your submission is declined for any reason, the tokens are still spent.
If you withdraw your submission during the pre-drop window, the tokens are spent.

This is deliberate. Curation is work; every submission has a real cost to us in compute and review time. The non-refundable submission charge is the smallest, fairest way to ask submitters to share that cost.

If you submit at a band lower than your assessed ceiling, you pay the lower band's submission cost. There is no submission fee for the assessment itself — your token spend matches your selling intent.

What kind of work fits

Unpinched is not a stock library. We are looking for images that show a photographer thinking, not a photographer executing.

That sounds vague. In practice, work tends to do well here when:

It has a recognisable hand. A consistent eye for light, framing, subject choice, or tonal treatment. Buyers who like one of your images should want to look at another.
Its subject matter rewards licensing. Strong editorial frames, atmospheric environmental work, distinctive portraits, considered still life — images that an editor can build a piece around.
It would not be made by anyone with a camera and the right preset. Technical competence is necessary but not sufficient. Generic landscapes, common food-blogger framings, decorative bokeh, well-lit but uninflected portraiture — these are what stock platforms are for.

If your portfolio shows a consistent style across subjects, lighting, and treatment, your individual submissions will tend to score well together — Unpinched looks for photographers, not just photographs.

A note on the experimental shape of this

The model described above is what Unpinched does today. Some of it is firm:

The principle that photographers receive the majority of every sale, and that the platform's share is small and fixed, is permanent.
The principle that every edition is finite, numbered, and publicly registered is permanent. We are not going to start issuing unlimited licences.
The principle that prices rise within an edition is permanent — early buyers earn their early-buyer discount; late buyers earn the right to a scarcer position.
The principle that the platform assesses and the photographer chooses is permanent. We will not strip authors of pricing agency, and we will not let pricing decisions be made for marketing reasons alone.

Some of it is still being tuned:

The exact band thresholds will move as we learn what the catalogue rewards.
The submission token costs may move — up or down — as we calibrate against demand.
The within-edition escalator multipliers may be refined.
The way the assessed ceiling is communicated, and what feedback you receive when an image is assessed at a lower band than you hoped, will improve.

We will keep this page up to date as the model changes. Where a change would affect images you have already submitted, we will tell you directly. Where a change only affects new submissions, we will announce it before it takes effect.

If you have questions about a specific submission, the dashboard is the right place to ask. For policy or model questions, submit a query through the platform. For anything we have not anticipated, write to [email protected].