Pricing is the decision that determines whether a studio survives, and most studios make it by copying whatever the firm they trained at did.
There are three common models in the Indian market. None is correct in general. Each is correct for a particular kind of project, and knowing which is which is most of the job.
Model 1 — Per square foot
The default for residential. You quote ₹80–₹250 per sq ft depending on city, segment and scope.
Where it works: repeatable residential work where the scope genuinely scales with area. A 1,200 sq ft 2BHK really is about two-thirds the work of an 1,800 sq ft 3BHK.
Where it breaks: a small, highly detailed apartment. A 900 sq ft flat with bespoke joinery in every room, three material revisions and a client who visits the site weekly can consume more studio hours than a 2,500 sq ft villa with a restrained palette. Per-square-foot pricing charges you less for the harder job.
The fix: band your rate by complexity, not just by area. Three bands — standard, detailed, bespoke — with a documented definition of each, applied at quoting time.
Model 2 — Percentage of project value
Typically 8–15% of the execution budget. Common in turnkey and in higher-value residential.
Where it works: turnkey projects where you are genuinely managing procurement and contractors, and your effort really does track the budget.
Where it breaks: it puts you and the client on opposite sides of every value-engineering conversation. When they ask you to find savings, you are being asked to reduce your own fee. Clients notice this, and the good ones raise it.
The fix: cap the percentage at a fee ceiling agreed up front, and bill value-engineering work separately as a design service. You want to be paid for the thinking, not the spending.
Model 3 — Fixed fee
A single number for a defined scope.
Where it works: everywhere, if your scope definition is genuinely tight and you have historical data on what similar projects actually cost you in hours.
Where it breaks: without that data it is a guess, and the variance on design work is brutal. The same brief delivered to the same team can vary 40% in hours depending entirely on the client.
The fix: you cannot price fixed-fee reliably until you measure. Which brings us to the actual point.
The number nobody tracks
Whatever model you use, the figure that decides profitability is studio hours per project, and almost no small studio knows it.
Here is the arithmetic. A designer on ₹45,000 a month costs roughly ₹2,600 a working day, or about ₹325 an hour before overhead. Load overhead at a conservative 1.6× and your real cost is ₹520 an hour.
A project quoted at ₹3,00,000 that consumes 700 studio hours cost you ₹3,64,000 to deliver. You lost ₹64,000 and it felt like a good project the whole way through, because nobody was counting.
Two projects at that fee with 400 hours each would have made ₹1,84,000.
The difference between those outcomes is not talent or rate. It is revisions, scope creep, and approvals that took six weeks instead of one. All measurable, none visible without a system — see why your interior projects lose money.
What to do on Monday
- Pick three finished projects. Reconstruct the hours honestly, even roughly.
- Divide the fee by the hours. That is your real realised rate.
- Compare it across the three. The spread will be larger than you expect.
- Find what the worst one had that the best one did not. It is almost always revision count or approval delay.
Then price the next one with that in front of you. Pricing is not a formula. It is a feedback loop, and most studios have never closed it.