ShootNest: Which Photography Work Actually Pays You
August 9, 2026
ShootNest is an offline business manager for photographers. Clients, a drag-and-drop shoot pipeline, quotes with live profitability, invoices that flag themselves overdue, a gear list for insurance, expenses and a cost-of-doing-business calculator — all in one HTML file on your own computer.
The thing it does that the subscription CRMs do not: it records every hour a job takes — shooting, travel, editing, admin, prep — and tells you what each shoot, and each type of shoot, actually paid per hour.
$7.99 once. No account, no monthly fee, nothing uploaded.
The number the category is missing
Studio management software is a mature market. Studio Ninja starts around $16 a month, Táve at $24.99, Sprout Studio at $19, HoneyBook at $36 monthly — and HoneyBook additionally takes 2.9% plus $0.25 on card payments. They are competent products. They track inquiries, contracts, workflows and money in, and they do it well.
What none of them ask is how many hours the job consumed. So none of them can compute the only figure that tells you whether the work is worth doing.
That matters more in photography than almost anywhere else, because the visible portion of the job is both small and inconsistent. A wedding at $3,800 across 42 real hours pays $71.67 an hour. A brand shoot at $1,400 across 12 pays $109.17. Every report you have ever run ranks the wedding first.
ShootNest ranks them the other way, and says so out loud on the dashboard: “Your biggest earner by revenue is Wedding — but Brand pays you more per hour.”
What is inside
| Section | What it does |
|---|---|
| Dashboard | Booked revenue, profit after direct costs, effective hourly rate against your CODB threshold, overdue invoices, and the work-type ranking |
| Shoots | Drag-and-drop board from Inquiry to Delivered, with the five hour buckets and five cost lines on every card |
| Clients | Contacts, how they found you, and lifetime value by hourly rate, not just spend |
| Quotes | Line-by-line builder that shows profitability as you type — then prints a clean client version with none of it |
| Invoices | Issued, due, paid; overdue calculated from the date so you do not have to remember |
| Gear | Serial numbers, purchase dates, replacement values, warranties — printable for insurance |
| Money & CODB | Overhead, expenses, tax set-aside, and the cost-of-doing-business calculator everything compares against |
| Reports | Client quote, hours breakdown, year summary, gear list |
The quote screen is the point
Most quote tools are formatters. You decide a number somewhere else, and they lay it out attractively.
In ShootNest each line carries three figures: what the client pays, what it costs you, and how many hours it takes you. The client only ever sees the first. Underneath, in an amber box that never prints, the app does the arithmetic while you type:
Client pays $4,450 · Costs you $730 · Left over $3,720 · Your hours 34 $109.41 an hour — comfortably above the $53.62 you need. Send it.
And when it does not clear:
$61.00 an hour against the $74.20 you need. At this price the job costs you money to do. To clear $74.20 an hour you would need to charge about $2,226 — that is $396 more than this quote.
That last line is the useful one. It is the difference between knowing a quote is thin and knowing what to change.
Honest arithmetic, including where it refuses to guess
A shoot with no hours recorded has no honest hourly rate. It would be easy — and flattering — to divide its fee by zero-ish hours and let the type it belongs to look better than it is.
ShootNest does not. Shoots without hours are counted in what you charged and excluded from every per-hour figure, and the app tells you how many it left out rather than quietly absorbing them. A pipeline full of unpriced inquiries will not inflate your wedding rate.
The cost-of-doing-business calculation uses the standard formula photographers already know — (annual overhead + target salary + tax) ÷ jobs per year — and a second version divided by realistic working hours, with vacation weeks taken out rather than assumed away.
What prints, and what does not
Four reports, all through your browser so you get a real PDF:
The client quote — your business details, the lines, the total, your terms. No costs, no hours, no margins. The owner-only boxes are removed from the print stylesheet entirely, not hidden with CSS you could accidentally reveal.
Where the hours went — every shoot in the year with fee, costs, hours and effective rate, sorted worst to best, then the same by type. The page that decides what you stop offering next season.
Year summary — income, direct costs, overhead by category, what is left, what to set aside for tax, and what is still owed to you. The page you hand an accountant instead of a shoebox.
Gear list for insurance — every item with serial number, purchase date and replacement value. Print it before you need it, and keep the paper somewhere other than the building the gear is in.
What ShootNest does not do
- No client portal, no online galleries, no contracts with e-signature. It does not compete with Pixieset or ShootProof and does not try to.
- No payment processing. It records that an invoice was paid; it does not take the money.
- No automated email workflows. No drip sequences, no scheduled reminders. It shows you who is overdue; you send the message.
- No calendar sync and no CRM integrations. One file, one computer.
- No multi-user access. A studio with three photographers sharing a database wants a subscription product, and should buy one.
- It does not survive a cleared browser. Export the backup. The JSON round-trips completely and the shoots CSV carries the calculated columns straight into a spreadsheet.
If your business genuinely needs automated client workflows and a booking portal, pay the $16 to $36 a month — it will be worth it. ShootNest is for the photographer who wants to know their numbers and does not want another subscription to know them.
Questions people ask
Is this a replacement for Studio Ninja or HoneyBook? For a solo photographer who mostly needs to track work and money, yes. For anyone who needs client-facing automation, no. The overlap is the record-keeping half, not the client-experience half.
How do I know my editing hours if I have never tracked them? Estimate honestly for the first few, then time one job properly with a timer. Most photographers find the real figure is 1.5 to 2 times their guess. Use the measured number from then on.
What if I do not fill in the CODB section? Everything still works; you just get raw hourly rates without a threshold to compare them against. The app says so rather than inventing a benchmark.
Does it handle sales tax or VAT? There is a single tax set-aside percentage for planning, not a tax engine. It is for knowing what to move into a separate account, not for filing.
Can I run it on a phone? It is responsive and will open, but the board and quote builder want a real screen. It is a desk tool.
Is there a trial? Yes — five shoots and five entries per section, and everything you enter stays in the file when you upgrade.
Does it work offline? Entirely. It has no external dependencies, loads nothing from a CDN, and has no server to talk to. Open it on a plane.
The arithmetic on price
The cheapest credible subscription in this category runs around $9 a month; the ones photographers actually name run $16 to $36, and HoneyBook raised prices sharply in early 2025 — some photographers reported their monthly cost more than doubling.
ShootNest is $7.99 once. Less than one month of the cheapest option, and it keeps working whether or not anyone is still maintaining a company behind it.
See ShootNest → · Or start with the free Shoot Quote Builder and see whether the effective hourly rate on your last quote surprises you.
Sources: Studio Ninja pricing, Táve pricing, Sprout Studio pricing, HoneyBook pricing.