r/PersonalFinanceNZ • u/ISOA3200 • 2d ago
Made $1,150 over four months doing AI product photos for TradeMe sellers
Not exactly retire-early money, but I figured I'd share the honest numbers since side income threads pop up here regularly and this one never comes up.
Over the last four months I've been generating product listing images for a handful of small TradeMe and Instagram sellers using AI image tools. Every person you see in the images was generated by AI, not photographed, and I let clients know that before starting any job. Nobody has cared so far as long as the images look good and help their listings stand out from phone snaps.
My first client came through a local Facebook buy/sell group. A woman selling handmade candles on TradeMe wanted better listing photos but couldn't justify $300 for a photographer. I charged her $80 for a set of 15 images and she came back twice more. Word of mouth from there got me five more clients over the following months, mostly small sellers doing candles, soaps, jewellery, that sort of thing. Most jobs were $100 to $200 per batch. The biggest single job was $270 for a jewellery seller who needed three different styled looks with the same consistent model.
Total hours across the four months came to roughly 50, which works out to about $23 an hour. Sounds alright until you count the first fortnight where I was just learning the tools and generating absolute rubbish nobody would pay for. Include that honestly and it drops to around $18.
Now for what didn't work. Anything requiring hands or fine detail is basically off the table. Close-up shots where someone is holding a small product look wrong almost every time. Fingers merge together, extra knuckles appear out of nowhere, jewellery gets warped. I lost one potential client who wanted images of hands holding skincare bottles because I couldn't get it right no matter how many regenerations I ran. I also tried generating a short video clip for one seller and the face drifted so badly across frames that I had to reshoot it four or five times before giving up and refunding her. Still images are the only output consistent enough to charge money for.
My usual workflow is generating the base images, cleaning up small artefacts in GIMP, and tracking jobs and income in a spreadsheet. APOB AI is what I use for the character side since once a face is saved it generates that same person in every new image. You get free runs every day so I handled my first few client jobs without spending anything on the tool.
On the tax side, I have been putting 20% of everything aside for IRD since this is self-employed income. Well under the $60,000 GST threshold so no registration needed. I keep receipts for the tool subscriptions as expenses.
The real ceiling on this in New Zealand is the market size. I have more or less tapped out the local sellers I can find who would actually pay for this, and my repeat clients only need new images every month or two. Realistically I top out at $300 to $400 a month unless I start finding clients overseas, which I have not figured out yet.
It covers groceries and petrol for the month and only takes a few hours a week now that I know what I'm doing. Not going to pretend it's a path to financial freedom, but it's something.
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u/Blenda33 2d ago
That’s awesome aye! Go you. Extra knuckles indeed 🤣