Pet Legacy · Notes

How Much Does a Custom Pet Portrait Cost?

It is the first question almost everyone asks, and it is the one most portrait sites answer with "contact us for a quote." Here is the honest version, with every one of our own prices written down at the bottom of the page.

What the market charges

"Custom pet portrait" covers four quite different things, and the price gap between them is enormous because you are paying for different amounts of human time, not different amounts of likeness.

• An original hand-painted commission — oil or acrylic on canvas from a working painter. Typically the high hundreds and up, often with a waiting list measured in weeks or months. You are buying a physical, one-of-a-kind object and the days of labour inside it.
• A hand-drawn digital commission — an illustrator working in Procreate or Photoshop. Usually mid-to-high double digits into the low hundreds, depending on the illustrator's following and how many subjects are in the piece.
• An Etsy or marketplace seller — the widest band of all, from a few dollars to a couple of hundred, because the label covers everything from a five-minute filter pass to a genuine illustrator. The price alone tells you very little; the shop's turnaround, revision policy and sample work tell you almost everything.
• A digital studio using AI art tools — where we sit. Single figures to low double digits, because the studio time per portrait is minutes of generation plus a person reviewing and refining it, not days at an easel.

What you should actually check before comparing prices

Two portraits at the same price can be very different purchases. Before you compare numbers, compare these four things, because they are what determines whether you end up with something you want on the wall:

1. What file you receive. A portrait you can only view is not a portrait you can print. Ask for the pixel dimensions and DPI. Ours is 4500×5400 pixels at 300 DPI, which prints cleanly at common frame sizes.
2. Whether you see it before you pay. A proof-before-payment policy costs the seller money and is the single strongest signal you are dealing with someone confident in the work.
3. The revision policy, in writing. "It has to look like your pet" is only meaningful if there is a stated way to fix it when it doesn't.
4. The stated turnaround. Not "fast" — an actual number of hours or days, given before you order.

How to get a high-quality pet portrait under $100

The reliable route is to separate the art from the printing. Buy the digital file, then have it printed and framed near you. A $9.99 digital portrait plus a local print-and-frame at $30–$60 puts a finished, framed piece on your wall for well under $100 — and because the file is yours, you can print it again later at a different size, or for a family member, without buying the artwork twice.

The place people overspend is buying a framed physical product for a portrait they haven't seen yet. Buy the file, approve the file, then decide how big it deserves to be.

Our prices, in full

This is the complete list. There is no price on this page that isn't on our pricing page, and nothing appears at checkout that isn't here.

Every portrait, at every price: a proof in 24–48 hours, your first revision free, and no payment until you've approved the proof. Printed pieces are made and shipped by our print partner, so their delivery time is the shipping time, not the art time.

Why ours costs what it does

We are cheaper than a commissioned painter for a reason we would rather state than hide: each portrait is created in our studio using AI art tools, starting and ending with your real photo — the pose, the markings, the eyes are theirs — and reviewed and refined by a person before you ever see it. We don't claim a human paints it by hand, because that wouldn't be true. What we promise instead is that it will look like them, or we keep working until it does, and you don't pay until you agree.

That is also why the file is yours outright. You own the files and may print them as often as you like for your own home and gifts.