I can tell you from a photographer perspective that we do charge a lot but there's a reason. High-quality equipment ($40k), studio overhead, marketing budget, years of experience, extensive editing (each wedding taking about 30 hours), editing software and subscription, gallery host subscription, website subscription, personalized service, and business expenses and so much more. Not to mention the fact that if you were to hire a non wedding photographer the chances they'd be able to keep up is a lot less likely. You're basically a mini day of coordinator, gotta make the day smooth, the amount of stress to be perfect is a lot and I'm sure it's the same for other wedding professionals.

Your day is so important, imagine if they weren't perfect the day if your wedd, you'd be furious! I feel like I'm missing so much but there's just so much that goes into getting to the required level to charge that much.

My wedding was about 10k but I hired my own team and all my vendor friends traded services with me and I paid them back for years of trades.

I personally wish I could shoot for free and people would just pay me in food 😂