The ten priced extras, and when each one is a waste of money
There are ten priced extras: descriptive photographs at €10, aerial photographs at €15, floor-plan positioning at €5 a panorama, a drawn floor plan at €0.60 per square metre, audio at €30 a file, video at €30 a file, Street View publishing at €10 a panorama, an extra language at €100, analytics at €0.50 per distinct connection, and a €50 one-off if you have no Analytics property yet. Most tours need none of them. This post says when each one earns its place and when it does not.
Everything below sits on top of the walkthrough, and the walkthrough itself is complete without any of it. The rule for what gets a published price rather than a quote is simple: if you can count the unit yourself and the effort per unit is near-constant, it goes on the list. If the scope is genuinely undefined until we have seen the building, it is quoted. The whole list, in its canonical form, is on pricing.
The list, with prices
| Extra | Price | Unit | What it is for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Descriptive photographs | €10 | each | A close-up on a DSLR, attached to a hotspot, opening full size over the panorama |
| Aerial photographs | €15 | each | Conventional aerial stills of the site and its setting, flown on the same visit |
| Floor-plan positioning | €5 | per panorama | Each panorama pinned to its place on a plan you already have |
| Floor plan drawn by us | €0.60 | per square metre | For a building with no usable plan. Minimum €45; €0.40 for each square metre after the first 150 |
| Audio | €30 | per file | One track across the whole tour, or a different one in every room |
| Video | €30 | per file | A video built into the tour and playing inside it |
| Publishing to Google Street View | €10 | per panorama | You choose which panoramas go, and it is rarely all of them |
| Extra language | €100 | per language | The whole information layer rebuilt over the same capture |
| Analytics on navigation | €0.50 | per distinct connection | Each route wired to your own Analytics property |
| Google Analytics setup | €50 | one-off | Only if you have no Analytics property yet |
All prices exclude VAT. Nine are metered per unit and one is per tour, which is where the count of ten comes from.
When each one is a waste of money
- Descriptive photographs
- Worth it when something in the room has to be legible and the panorama cannot carry it — a dish, a product, a piece of equipment, a certificate on a wall. A waste when they become a second photo gallery bolted onto a walkthrough. If a visitor has to click twelve of them in one room, the room needed another camera position instead.
- Aerial photographs
- Worth it when the setting is the selling point: a seafront position, a campsite in a landscape, a site whose layout only makes sense from above. A waste in a city-centre unit whose surroundings are other buildings. Note what this is and is not — conventional aerial stills from a normal drone. There is no 360° camera in the air, so aerial never produces a position you can stand in and look around from.
- Floor-plan positioning
- Worth it in anywhere a visitor can get lost: a large institutional building, a multi-floor hotel, a campus. The marker moves with you, so you always know where you are standing. A waste in a four-room apartment, where the plan tells you nothing the rooms have not already told you, and where at €5 a panorama it is a meaningful fraction of a small job for no gain.
- A floor plan drawn by us
- Worth it when there is no usable plan at all and one is genuinely needed. A waste when you have one in a drawer, or when what you actually want is dimensional certainty. A tour does not measure a building. If the number has to be right, the honest answer is a drawn plan or a professional measurement. Not something inferred from a panorama. That argument is set out in what a tour cannot show you.
- Audio
- Worth it for narration in an interpretation-heavy building, where a voice does the job that text on screen does badly. A waste as background music. It plays over whatever the visitor is already listening to, it cannot be predicted on a phone in a public place, and it is the first thing people turn off.
- Video
- Worth it when there is genuine motion the space cannot carry on its own — a machine running, a process, an event the building hosts. A waste when it is the promotional video you already have, dropped in because it exists. It will be the heaviest file in the folder and the one most likely to need replacing in a year.
- Publishing to Google Street View
- Worth it for the entrance, the frontage and one or two interior positions, where being findable in Search and Maps does real work. A waste published wholesale: forty panoramas on Street View is forty things you no longer control the presentation of, and it is not your tour. The distinction is argued in Street View is not your virtual tour.
- An extra language
- Worth it when you can name the audience — a hotel with a specific inbound market, an institution recruiting abroad. A waste as a completeness exercise. A language layer is content you now have to maintain: change a popup and you change it twice.
- Analytics
- Worth it if somebody will actually look at the numbers and act on them. A waste if nobody in the organisation opens Analytics, which is most organisations. It also cannot tell you whether a booking happened, because that happens elsewhere — see €0.50 a hotspot means about €1.07 a station.
- Analytics setup
- Worth €50 exactly once, and only if you have no property. If you already have one, there is nothing to set up and nothing to pay, and any supplier charging you a set-up fee on top of an account you already own should be asked what it is for.
What our own archive shows about uptake
- Of the twelve published projects, one records aerial capture — the hotel in Budva, on the Montenegrin coast, where the setting is part of what is being sold.
- One records floor plans, and it has two: the university building, where a tracked plan does real wayfinding work across two floors and forty-eight positions.
- None carries a 360° video. Not one of the seventeen tours.
- None carries more than one language layer. Every published tour runs in a single language.
- In the one tour whose overlays are tagged in the file, 80 of the 81 popups are tagged as descriptive images and one as information — so in that build the popup layer is overwhelmingly photographs rather than text.
That is what the delivered tours show, and it is the limit of what we can tell you honestly. We have not kept a record of what clients asked about and then dropped, or which extras we talked someone out of, so we are not publishing an uptake rate or a “most popular add-on” list. Both would be invented, and the whole point of this section of the site is that nothing here is.
What is quoted rather than listed, and why
Nine further things are quoted per job because their scope is not knowable until we have seen the building or read your documentation: branded tour controls, content creation (the words and videos inside the tour), 3D models and digital mapping and standalone video, enhanced finish (day-to-dusk, decluttering, virtual furnishing), training and induction tours, contractor familiarisation and access-information passes, live guided sessions, VR headset and offline and kiosk builds, and an annual refresh. Each carries its reason on pricing — an unexplained gap in a price list reads as evasion, and usually is.
The annual refresh is the one worth knowing about in advance: it is priced from the same rate card once we know what actually changed, and the positions that have not changed are not re-charged. It is not hosting and it is not a retainer, because there is nothing to retain — you hold the files either way.
Questions people ask
- What are the hidden costs of a virtual tour?
- With us there are none that are hidden, but there are costs beyond the capture rate: VAT, travel beyond 25 km from Tirana at cost with no markup, accommodation at cost on jobs needing more than a day away, and any of the ten priced extras you choose. All of them appear in the written quote before anything is booked, and none ever appears for the first time on an invoice.
- Do you shoot 360° photographs from a drone?
- No. Aerial means conventional aerial stills and video from a normal drone, priced at €15 per photograph. There is no 360° camera in our kit that flies, so there is no aerial position a visitor can stand in and look around from. Exactly one of our twelve published projects includes aerial capture, and it is a coastal hotel whose setting is part of what it is selling.
- How much does it cost to add a second language to a tour?
- €100 per language. That rebuilds the whole information layer — hotspot labels, popup text, menus — over the same capture, so a second language costs a fraction of the original build rather than another shoot. It can be added to a tour that has already been delivered. The thing to weigh is maintenance rather than price: every future text change has to be made in every language.
- Can I add extras to a tour you have already delivered?
- Most of them, yes, and without re-shooting. Analytics, Street View publishing, an extra language, floor-plan positioning, audio and video are all build changes to an existing tour and are quoted at the same published unit rates. Descriptive and aerial photographs are the exception, because they have to be shot, which means another visit.
- Which extras do most clients buy?
- We do not publish that, because we have not recorded it in a way we would be willing to stand behind. What we can tell you is what the delivered tours contain: of twelve published projects, one includes aerial capture, one includes floor plans, none includes a 360° video and none runs in more than one language. Most tours are the walkthrough and nothing else.
