Written by the BetterPic team. Disclosure: BetterPic is one of the options priced below, and its prices are in the list along with everyone else's. Figures are each company's own published numbers, checked in September 2026.
The honest answer has a wide range, because "a headshot" covers four different purchases that share a name.
A studio session with a portrait photographer: roughly $150 to $500. One to two hours, several looks, a handful of retouched finals. The range is mostly geography and the photographer's demand rather than quality. At the lower end you often get fewer finals rather than worse ones.
A corporate on-site day: $1,500 to $5,000 for a team. A photographer comes to you, sets up a lighting kit and photographs everyone in sequence. Per head it can be cheaper than individual sessions, and the real cost is the scheduling — the people who are travelling, on leave, or joined last week are not in the set, and getting them means doing it again.
A generated set: $18 to $79 for one person. Entry points across the category cluster tightly. Team pricing runs per seat with volume steps.
Doing it yourself: free. A window, a phone on a shelf, and the timer. Genuinely viable, and the limiting factor is the room rather than the camera.
Not better pixels. Modern phones resolve more than enough for any professional use.
It buys direction — someone telling you where your chin goes and catching the frame where your expression is right, which is the hardest variable and the one you cannot self-assess. It buys controlled light. And it buys certainty: the photographer will produce something usable for any face, including the ones generators fail on.
That last point is the honest case for paying. Generated tools fail unevenly, most reliably on strong prescription glasses, tightly curled hair and darker skin tones. A camera has no opinion about any of that.
The sticker price is not the cost. The cost is price divided by usable outputs.
Every generated tool produces a batch, of which you would genuinely use a few. Nobody publishes that ratio because it depends on your face and on what you uploaded. A $29 tool that produces nothing you would use is more expensive than a $200 session that produces one photograph you use for three years.
Which is why the sensible way to buy is to test rather than to compare: buy the smallest package, or use a free tier, and count how many of the batch you would actually put on a profile.
One person, and the photograph matters — a leadership page, a book jacket, a practice you are building: pay a photographer. It is a few hundred pounds or dollars once, for something you use for years.
One person, and it is a LinkedIn profile: the window and the timer first, then a generated set if the room does not work. The free tier covers up to 10 images, which is enough to find out.
Forty people, and consistency matters more than any single face: generated, at per-seat pricing, and keep the budget you saved for doing it again in eighteen months rather than doing it better now. The current tiers are $35 to $79 for individuals.
Whatever you choose, the expensive mistake is not the price band. It is buying once and then never replacing it, so that the photograph stops looking like you.