Traditional studio pricing
An individual session with a professional photographer typically runs $150 to $500 depending on city, studio time and how many retouched finals are included. Executive and editorial sessions go considerably higher.
On-site team shoots are usually priced per day plus a per-person retouching fee, which for a thirty-person company lands in the low thousands before anyone accounts for the hours of staff time spent queuing.
AI pricing
Training-based AI services cluster around $19 to $40 for a pack of images from one selfie set. Edit-based services cost a fraction of that per image because there is no per-user training run to pay for, which is why a free tier is viable at all.
A simple rule
Book a photographer when the photo is the product — author jackets, executive press kits, campaign imagery where a specific art direction matters. Use AI when the photo is infrastructure: LinkedIn, team pages, speaker bios, internal directories, proposal footers.
Most people need the second category and pay for the first out of habit.