If you've been eyeing LocalFocal, thinking "this sounds great, but how is this possible? This sounds too good to be true.", this post is for you. It's absolutely true, and it's going to change how creatives of every kind are found, photographers, videographers, hair and makeup artists, and the people looking for them, saving everyone time, the creatives and the people looking for them. Here's everything you need to know about listing on LocalFocal, with nothing hidden in the fine print.

A free profile, a home for your portfolio, clients finding you while you sleep, none of it costs you a dime until you're getting paid.

Everything it takes to get found and get in front of clients costs you nothing:

• Creating your profile
• Listing your services and packages
• Your portfolio, your photos or videos, your pricing
• The marketing and advertising we do to bring clients to the platform
• Getting discovered in search by clients in your area

There's no subscription, no signup fee, no credit card required to list, and no charge while you wait for clients to find you. You could sit on LocalFocal for a year without a single booking and pay exactly $0.

That's not a promotional period. It's just the model.

When a client books you through LocalFocal, here's what we keep:

• If you're one of our first 50 Founding Members, we keep 10% of that initial booking for your first five bookings. You keep 90%.
• After your first five bookings, or if you sign up after the first 50, we keep 20% of that initial booking. You keep 80%.

To be clear about how it works:

• It applies to the initial booking only, the first one with that client.
• It doesn't matter how you structure your pricing. Hourly rate, session fee, half-day rate, full-day rate, or a package price. Whatever the client pays for that first booking, the fee is that percentage of it.

You get paid, we take our share, and that's it.

And that rate isn't locked in once your founding bookings are used up, either. You can pay less than 20% on future bookings anytime:

Referrals. Share your referral link with other creatives. Each one who signs up drops your fee to 10% on your next booking. Refer a few friends and your next several bookings are all at half the standard rate.

So an early creative who refers a couple of friends can spend their first stretch on LocalFocal paying 10%, and keep every dollar of every repeat booking after that.

Here's the detail that changes the math completely, and it's the one photographers most often don't realize:

Any sale that happens between you and that client after the initial booking is entirely yours. We never touch it.

Think about what that means in practice:

• A client books a portrait session through LocalFocal. Six months later they come back for family photos and book you directly. That's 100% yours.
• A bride finds you on LocalFocal for her engagement session. Later, the wedding album, the prints, the gallery wall order. All yours.
• A client loves their headshots and refers their whole office to you. Every one of those bookings is between you and them. We take nothing.
• A bride books you for wedding hair and makeup through LocalFocal. The trials, touch-ups, and every bridal party after that are booked with you directly. We take nothing.
• You turn a $500 session into a $10,000 client relationship over a few years of repeat business. Not a dollar of that goes to LocalFocal.

Most platforms and agencies want a piece of everything, forever. We're not structuring it that way. We bring you the client. The relationship you build with them after that is the whole reward of doing good work, and it belongs to you.

Great question, and as you can probably tell, there's a lot here. Creating and managing the platform is just the start. There are helpful blog posts and resources for growing your business, ways to find and collaborate with other creatives, whether that's a hair and makeup artist for your next shoot, a videographer to team up with, or the perfect rentable location, plus a growing community of clients coming here to find exactly what you do. A lot goes into putting all of that together and getting the word out, and the fee is what pays for it.

Getting clients is still the hardest and most expensive part of running a creative business. Creatives spend thousands of dollars a year chasing work: Instagram ads, Google ads, wedding expo booths, hours of content posting, endless "in search of a photographer" comment threads. Most of that money is spent whether or not it lands you a single booking.

And those comment threads only get worse with time. You post, then you spend your week checking back, refreshing, hoping someone useful replies. The more LocalFocal gains traction, the more it becomes the go-to place clients check first, so they come straight to your profile instead of leaving you waiting on a comment thread.

With LocalFocal, we do that legwork for you, and it costs us real money to do it. We're behind the scenes marketing the platform, driving the traffic, running the ads, and building the search tools that hand you the inquiry.

Think of it like hiring a salesperson on pure commission, except:

1. The salesperson works completely free until they actually land you a client.
2. They only ever get paid on the first sale.
3. Every sale after that, forever, is 100% yours.

If you'd happily pay a salesperson those terms to bring you new clients, LocalFocal is that salesperson, already working. There's nothing to lose and so much to gain.

Say a client books a $1,000 session through LocalFocal.

• LocalFocal's fee: $200, one time
• You keep: $800, plus every dollar that client ever spends with you afterward

Now compare that to what you'd spend finding that client on your own. Even a modest ad budget on Instagram or Google runs $200 to $500 a month, with no guarantee of a single inquiry. And that's before the hours you spend posting, responding, and hoping.

If LocalFocal never brings you a client, you pay nothing. If it brings you one, 20% of the first booking was the entire cost of acquiring a client who is now yours for life.

Nothing here is too good to be true, because the fee isn't hiding anywhere. It's one line: we keep a percentage of your initial booking with a client, 10% for our first 50 Founding Members and 20% after that, one time, and nothing on anything after.

No subscription. No upfront cost. No commission on repeat business, upsells, prints, albums, or referrals. Just a platform doing the client-finding work you'd otherwise be doing yourself.

You've got nothing to lose and new clients to gain. If that sounds like a good deal, it's because it is. Create your profile today and see what comes in.