Pricing
Hickory designs finished hardcover books from photographs. Personal does it for your own photo library. Studio does it for photographers, who deliver client galleries and sell the albums at prices they set.
Personal plan
Your own photos, made into a real book you can hold.
Designing is free, and you can order any book you build. $9/month adds the engine's eye and takes $30 off every hardcover. Cancel anytime.
First 100 studios — locked for life
Studio plan
The same engine on a client gallery, with a storefront on top.
No card until you send a gallery to a client. Then a 7-day free trial.
| What you get | Personal | Studio |
|---|---|---|
| Automatic book design | ||
| Edit every page | ||
| Unlimited books | ||
| Sizes & finishes | 9 options | 9 options |
| Price per copy | $30–$85 | You set it |
| Client galleries | — | |
| Your logo & colors | — | |
| Clients buy in the gallery | — | |
| Fee per copy | — | $8 flat |
Prices in USD. Books are billed per copy, only when one is ordered.
How the money works
We charge two things and neither is a percentage: a flat monthly subscription, and a flat $8 on each copy your client orders. $8 a copy whether you price the book at $89 or at $400 — we don’t take a share of your markup, and we don’t earn more because you charge more.
Free
Create the studio, upload the gallery, let the AI draft the book, edit it until it's right. Drafting costs nothing, however many books you make.
They pay
Your client checks out inside your gallery, at the price you set. The album carries your studio's name; ours appears only as the credit line underneath it.
We print
We print and drop-ship the copy to them. One figure comes off the top — printing, shipping and our $8 fee together — and your studio shows you that figure beside the price field before you publish. Whatever you priced above it stays with you.
What a copy costs you
Your studio shows you two figures beside the price field: what a copy costs you, and what you keep. The cost figure is everything it takes to put the book in your client’s hands — printing, binding, shipping to their door, and our $8 — added up into a single line, because a price sheet is a working tool, not a receipt to reconcile.
A new studio opens with a 100-page hardcover called the Signature Album, suggested at $89. The $89 is a starting point you are expected to change — you know what your clients pay you and we don’t. Leave it there and the arithmetic is:
The price you set
$89
What a copy costs you
$31.78
Yours to keep
$57.22
Price it higher and every extra dollar is yours: the $31.78 doesn’t move when you do. It changes with the book — a longer gallery makes a longer book and costs a little more — and it drops when several copies ship together in one parcel. Whatever it works out to for the book you actually built, your studio shows you before you publish it.
Your Hickory subscription sits outside this arithmetic — it is a flat monthly fee and doesn’t scale with how many books you sell.
What you're actually selling
A casewrap hardcover, press-printed in full colour on premium coated stock. It is a genuinely beautiful companion book. It is not a lay-flat flush-mount album, and we won’t describe it as one.
Size
8.5 × 11 inches
Softcover is available too, at a lower price point.
Cover
Casewrap hardcover
Binding
Standard bound, not lay-flat
Paper
Premium coated, full colour
Length
Follows the gallery
The book is as long as the photos justify, anywhere from 24 to 150 pages. There is no fixed page count to pad out or trim to.
Delivery
Two to three weeks
Printed after the order and shipped straight to your client, not to you.
What the subscription covers
The plans are at the top of this page. What is worth repeating here is what the fee is not: it takes no percentage of your markup, it does not rise as you sell more, and it does not change what a copy costs you. The only per-copy figure is the flat $8 above, and it is the same on a $89 album as on a $400 one.
Designing is free. You can open a studio, upload your first gallery, let the engine draft the book and set your prices without paying us anything — the subscription is what lets you send that gallery to your client and sell from it.
Leave your email and we'll send a walkthrough and a real book sample to look at.
Before you ask
No — we take $8 a copy, flat. Price the book at $89 and we take $8; price it at $400 and we take $8. It is already inside the cost figure your studio shows you, so the margin beside it is what you actually keep. We would rather you read that here than find it later.
Two things. A flat $39/month (or $29 if you’re in the first 100) to run the studio, and one per-copy cost when a client orders — printing, shipping and the $8 fee together. On the Signature Album at $89 that per-copy cost is $31.78 and you keep $57.22. There is no design fee, no setup fee and no per-gallery fee.
Nothing. Open a studio, upload a gallery you've already delivered, and look at the book it drafts. No card, and nothing is printed until a real order is placed.
You do, per product, in your studio. We show you what a copy costs you and what you keep, and both update as you type the price. We never set or suggest a price to your client. The only price we refuse is one that would sell the book below what it costs to make.
Yes. The first 100 studios to subscribe pay $29/month for as long as they keep the subscription — it never rises to the regular $39/month. Billing is monthly and you can cancel anytime.
Yes, in one place and one way. Your studio’s name leads on the gallery, the shop and the album; underneath it sits a single credit line — “Made with Hickory”. Order emails and the payment receipt come from us today. We never sell or share your client list, and we never put anything in front of your client while they are deciding whether to buy from you. After a book has been delivered, we may tell that buyer Hickory also makes books from their own photos — their camera roll, not your shoot.
Start here
Upload a finished gallery and look at the book it designs. That's the whole evaluation, and it costs you nothing.