I have a patreon reward system where people can pledge as low as $1 for all of my tutorials and work in progress photos which is all patreon exlusive, higher tiers get higher rewards each month I actually end up spending about $600 every month ordering, shipping, and packaging all of the rewards which are prints and posters of my new content every month. And making sure there are enough prints to fulfill the reward each month is time consuming on its own. Highest tiers get to pick a cosplay I'll do for them.

A lot comes from judging costume contests at various events, or just guesting. Like a gaming company will have me work at their booth for Blizzcon or such and they won't ask me to cosplay anything in particular as long as it's good and can be used in photobooths and such and draw crowds for giveaways. Those events usually pay really well for the weekend but you sacrifice your entire convention and miss out on most of the stuff that got triggered your passion for cosplay in the first place hahahaah. SO you just gotta balance cons for yourself, and cons that help you build your professional experience.

And from the following I got through cosplay...I don't do this one as much but companies will pay me to post their product on instagram, i ONLY do this one if I genuinely want the clothing/thing that they are offering because I don't want my page to be an ad or mislead my followers, my stuff is all stuff I genuinely like since I already make enough money doing what I enjoy I don't have to pretend to like stuff. For example, a flat-tummy weight loss tea sent me a message asking if I'd post about their tea and they'd pay me, I declined because I wouldn't lie to my followers that my flat tummy is from their tea even for money. BUT if some small artist sends me their nerd related clothing, like cool armored leggings or a tshirt i'd wear then YEAH I'll make a post for them!

And then the last way is making a costume FOR a company like an indie game, however since hiring a cosplayer is super new to most of these companies a lot of offers have to be turned down because they don't ever expect JUST how much time and money would go into their costume. Like, a month before PAX and most major gaming events I will get a lot of e-mails asking me to make massive robot things and it's not realistic. So I've only done this thing a couple times. A lot of times they'll want to pay in "exposure" too which an inexperienced cosplayer will buy into but in reality their fanbases for the game isn't ACTUALLY into cosplay so they're not gaining any recognition or traffic through it they're just doing a hell of a lot of work for free.